


A Dance in Syzygy

by amorousamygdala



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical violence (if the canon was mildly realistic), Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Mental Instability, More characters to be added as this progresses, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Redemption, Slow Burn, Widow has had several consecutive bad times
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-21
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-08-16 11:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8101072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorousamygdala/pseuds/amorousamygdala
Summary: The story of how paths cross and realities crash, and how sometimes that's for the better. It's not simple, or easy, or even poetic. It's just life. After all, some things have to be broken before they can mend. (AKA: a slow burn redemption widowtracer-y fic riddled with angst that doesnt follow the basic premise most widowtracer fics do mostly because i brainstorm way too much)((i've been editing this damn summary forever so the AKA will probably be more help than the babbling))





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first fic I've ever posted, so feedback is greatly appreciated!

It should have been clean, she thinks idly, mild disappointment turning the corners of her mouth ever so slightly down. There is a panic in the back of her chest, pounding at her ribcage, begging to be freed. It's curious, and invasive, and she decides she would much prefer it gone. The feeling is muffled by her heartbeat, silenced by the ticking clock and the low hum of the nearby buildings. It is buried beneath the sounds and feelings of the world like a bad dream is buried by morning coffee and mindless work. Buried like a body, beneath layers of dirt.

 

At least it has been quiet. He'd had no voice to scream with, his pretty throat spilling his life forth like some cruel waterfall, ruby and enchanting. It streamed in webs down the mountainous bumps and grooves of this body, over the tendons and shoulder blades and pooling in lakes on the snowy plane of the mattress.

 

It is beautiful, was beautiful– and now it stinks. It is curdling like old milk on his pillow, his eyes staring emptily upwards. His mouth hangs open dumbly, and she considers how undignified he looks in death. The panic tries feebly to seize her again as she imagines his body bloating, rotting, crumbling away. A great monument crumbling to dust beneath the forces of nature; sand falling away between her fingers.

 

The clock ticks. A car speeds by, and the headlights throw a blinding flash across the room through the slits between the curtains before it is gone again. Like an angel, passing her by. Leaving her behind.

 

The ring on her finger is spattered with his blood. Her stomach roils as she slips it off, but she doesn't let it give her pause. It hits the carpet with a dull thump, soft and distant. She turns, head high, and she can hear the heavy tug of the curtains being swept aside; the soft murmur of the audience, breath baited in anticipation. The house is silent now, the hallways dim, but she can feel the cold illumination of a thousand spotlights on her shoulders.

 

Her heart beats, and she walks in time to the waltz in her chest. Her toes point with each deliberate movement, her back straight, her eyes set nowhere particular but resolutely forward. She is a testament to her training, breathing grace and poise out in soft, cloudy breaths that steam and swirl brightly in the freezing air before dissolving into shadow. There is nothing but the thrum of her heart in her ears, and the orchestra takes up its strings.The panic roils and twists, but she is nothing if not professional. The show goes on.

 

The words feel empty on her tongue, which should be funny, because she's said them so many times before with a meaning she can't put a finger on now. She says them again, feels them on her lips and sets them out into the quiet to hear them echo, searching for something more in the hollow sound of her voice.

 

A mountain turns to dust in her wake. She is strong. She is still. And yet. The words fall from her mouth once more, shattering as they leave her, shaking and falling to pieces.

 

_Adieu, chérie._

 

-

The vials sit between her fingers precariously, or so it would seem to someone with untrained eyes. They are tightly secured between her knuckles, gold and purple light mingling to make a soft sort of orange where the glows encroach on one another on top of her middle finger. It appears like a tiny sunset to her remaining eye, as it has the thousands of other times she's sat ruminating over the dim light of her darts.

 

Of all the things to leave her, this little decision stays; the night or the day, the love or the hate. The life, or the death. When she had been young and bold, the color was that of a sunrise, that of hope. Sometimes it still is, when the sky is clear and the world almost seems okay for a precious breath. Then she tastes the smoke, sees the fire, and reality stings the same way it always has. She is too old to expect anything less.

 

The purple vial shifts, violet and lilac and fuchsia in turns, enchanting and elegant and sickly. It's twin is molten gold, warm and inviting and more dangerous than it would seem. The orange in the center is her indecision, a split second of hesitation that costs so much more than just that second. This sliver of evening reminds her of the line she walks, and which side she will choose to fall on.

 

She is something of a god, sitting impartially up here in her perch, she thinks wryly. Reyes would tell her she is trying too hard to be aloof, and he'd be only half right.

 

The shadowy creature– the Reaper, she's heard it called– writhes, and her wrist turns so as to pop the purple dart into the waiting slot, but there is something in the scratch of its voice. Something ringing of ghosts or memories gone rotten, something that tastes of regret and twinges the shrapnel scars littering the remains of her right eye socket.

 

Amari's wrist snaps again, and the yellow dart clicks into the rifle with the same sound it always has, but this time it seems to ring clearer. Damn these old men, digging up buried sentiments and dragging her along for the ride. She moves her eye mere inches to the right, and the golden bullet hits the shoulder of Seventy-six. The empty cartridge falls to the concrete; spent. The soldier rises, not yet sharing the status.

 

-

 

 

There are some mornings, she considers, where the world is wrong.

A gust of wind shrieks past the window that won't quite close all the way, and she tracks a bird as it leaps off a crooked power line.

 

There isn't anything specific that's causing the imbalance– which is worse, because she can't gut whatever is causing her problem. Mists shift and curl lazily through the lower streets, lit up by fingers of morning where the sun peeks between the buildings. The few people living in the cluster of blocks they call a town are still for the most part asleep, but a handful are beginning to creep out of their homes to begin their work in the early light, brows wrinkled and eyes not yet fully open.

 

It'll rain later, she thinks, peering out at the grey slate that the sky is becoming. The sun will slip behind it on its ascent in an hour or so.

 

She pulls on a woolen shirt, rising from the rickety bed and pulling her hair from beneath the collar in one motion. She leaves it down, unbrushed. There's no need for her to seem put together; nobody among the groups of farmers and small families to impress. She gives Widow's Kiss a quick once-over, tugging the straps holding the weapon in place before flipping the guitar case shut. She's never known how to play the instrument, but it's not like she'd need to open the case to begin with. If that were to happen, this town would be dead the second some poor fool got too curious.

 

She never played the guitar. An idle thought– one she has no business wasting time on.

 

She had played the piano though. She can't remember the song, but she can feel the way she would play it, can feel the way she would move along with the melody, echoes that her body hasn't left behind yet. Her fingers remember the strike of the keys, her wrists remember the twist at the scale transitions. Her feet remember the pedals, keeping time.

 

Time she shouldn't be wasting on shit like this.

 

The floorboards squeal as she makes her way down the hall, away from that musty room. The entire area smells like mold and people far past their prime– people who have never had a prime. They remind her of sheep; perhaps that's why this place has an atmosphere of lethargy about it. The air itself is trying to lure her mind in pointless directions. She finds herself suddenly glad she will be returning to a base soon.

 

She leaves plain cash on the lobby counter, irritated. The clerk is a young girl, short and disinterested. she puts the money in the register mechanically, and tosses the room key haphazardly into a drawer. Widow pulls the scarf to her nose as she walks out the door, letting her hair veil most of her face. Nobody who saw her would care; hell, they'd assume she was a body modder or something, with her discoloration. Not that she wanted anyone to get close enough to assume much of anything.

 

The only reason she had to suffer this place was because they couldn't risk an airdrop from her last location, so she'd had to make her way to somewhere they could actually station someone. Or maybe they just enjoyed making her trudge across the world for pointless intel and meaningless assassinations just to keep her busy. The train had been loud and the air had tasted recycled, and the inn was worse. The man running it was middle aged and smelled like tobacco, and his gentle smile reminded her of people shed known as a child. She contemplates killing him too– maybe he'd seem more in place among the corpses he seemed so keen on making her remember.

 

She contemplates killing most everyone she meets though, so this thought is easy to brush aside. Mostly.

 

She can forget them all soon, she assures herself. And if it doesn't happen on its own she can make the memories go away. She won't be here much longer– and this feeling making her head slow and her heart jump, it'll be gone. She will leave it here among the sheep.

 

-

 

Lena taps a short staccato beat on the rim of the accelerator, playing spectator to the exchange between Winston and Angela.

 

"Gibraltar might be an adequate solution for now, but it's too well known. We can't be gathered in one place until we have somewhere more defensible."

 

"I'm afraid it might be our soundest option. It was one of our safest bases back–"

 

"Back before it became a ruin and we became–" He winces ever so slightly, still rubbed wrong by what happened. He'd never been the toughest when it came to this stuff, poor big guy. "particularly incapable of maintaining it. I was only here because nobody cared and some higher ups still had a soft spot for me or something– and I still had a talon break-in!"

 

He doesn't say what they're both thinking, that the incident had happened before the Recall. Now? The world is watching them, and a good chunk of it isn't keen on them kicking up dust again.

 

Winston sighs and runs a hand over his eyes. Her old instincts say to pat him on the shoulder, but her new ones point out that she would have to cross about four feet to do it, and her arm isn't long enough to keep holding on to the accelerator over that distance. Some stupid reasonable part of her points out that she doesn't need to be touching it for it to work, but it's quickly shut up by the way she had hit the concrete roof, by the way the world had flickered in front of her. By the memories– no, nightmares. By the nightmares. 

 

She briefly thinks about picking the damn thing up, but by the time she's considered it the moment to move is gone. Angela is saying something, and she grasps feebly at the thread the conversation is following. It doesn't work. Something about talon. Something about mercenaries.

 

The accelerator hums. A woman smiles, her lips a red so deep they drip blood. Her chair is unforgivingly hard, and her shoulders somehow sag even deeper.

 

She rubs at her own eyes, the skin beneath them thin and sickly. She has to stifle a yawn so as not to interrupt Angela, and it only partially works. Propping her elbow up on the back of the seat, she rests her head on her hand, squinting at the screen and the outline of Winston interrupting the rectangle of harsh blue light. Her fingers tap out another lazy tune on the rim of the accelerator, and it falls apart as soon as it starts.

 

She blinks once, twice, and then not at all, finding the effort required to pry her eyes open again quite simply impossible to garner. Angela's voice rings like a bell, and Winston's low rumble is like thunder off in the distance. The occasional whine of the machinery is almost like warbling birds, screeching at everything that moves– and even if it isn't, it's not like she's awake enough the make the distinction.

 

The accelerator hums.

 

The accelerator sparks.

 

Her eyes shoot open, and she is met with smoke and dust and a stifling midday sun. The world shimmers in every direction that isn't immediately in front of her, silver mirage lines dancing and twisting on the empty road to her front and back.

 

There should be a bleached cow skull sitting ominously on a rock. A tumbleweed. The first warbling notes of a suspenseful tune. She would laugh at the thoughts, poke at the nearest person who would listen, giggle at whatever face they made in reaction, but she is alone, and the thoughts don't seem all that funny anymore.

 

Her pulse thrums in her ears. She's been running. When has she ever not?

 

She tries to look left, right, any direction that isn't the cracked, worn, faded road. It doesn't work. There's only the dust, only the too-orange sky, only the stiff flapping of a bird she can't see taking off. Only the road.

 

Her sweat makes her hold on her weapons shaky, and she can taste the grime and salt on her lips when she licks them. There's blood somewhere in there too, but she doesn't think too hard about where it came from or who it belongs to. Her skin feels flushed and she wants nothing more than to shuck off her jacket. Her instincts say that taking her finger off the trigger would be her signature on her own death sentence.

 

It's not long before she's tempted to damn her instincts to hell.

 

A vulture makes a dejected sound, and her eyes flick up only to meet an empty sky. Nothing.

 

A tuft of dead grass rustles, and her eyes flick to the side of the road. Only dust. Only ever dust.

 

A flash of red, tattered and fading. He is nothing but red, his clothes, his smile, his one remaining eye. "Jesse," she says, but it's too late.

 

A gun cocks.

 

"Jesse?" Winston asks, and she is here, she is now, and the accelerator hums. Unbroken.

 

"To my knowledge he is heading to your location, though knowing him he may get detoured. It may be for the best that we take our time in assembling our remaining resources, considering." Angela is pure business to anyone untrained in Doctor-speak, but laced into her voice are notes of exhaustion– and more importantly, hope.

Elsewhere in her voice lies apprehension. She loves Winston and Lena both, loves, or at least used to love, Overwatch, Lena knows that. But she was so involved with what happened, there was no way all of her memories went untarnished by the way things fell apart.

 

Winston holds Lena's gaze, brows creased. She waves a hand, crookedly smiling as she tries to sit up straighter. He makes a face, one that she suspects means they'll be having a discussion later. Before anyone can make further inquiries, she hefts the accelerator under her arm and heads off to find a couch to crash on. Or the coffee maker. One of the two.

 

-

 

"Together." She says. The air is cooling but damp with previous rain. Moths flitter around the few light sources riveted to the side of the glorified cement block. Her elbows rest on the railing, unarmored. Vulnerable.

 

Though, she is never truly.

 

Together. She can still taste the word on her tongue, and it is bitter. Old. It echoes of something she's left behind; something better left hidden beneath denial and cold indifference. She tries to be cold about this too, but there is something in this concoction of the new Overwatch and the old faces and the man standing with her who rings of someone dead... There's something in all of it that's leading her thoughts astray like so many moths. Doomed to burn, giving themselves up for their infatuation with the flames.

 

Together.

 

She works alone. The mission, the hunt, the kill, the rush, it's hers.

 

The corners of her mouth turn down, souring her neutral expression. This is childish and beneath her. If the new threat of overwatch demands her cooperation she will serve Talon, and she will serve it well. Nothing has been promised to her, excepting pain upon failure. It is a lesson: the show goes on, and the dancer does not take the roaring crowd for granted, lest it tear her apart for her insolence. Back straight. No hesitation.

 

He doesn't respond. She can't tell if he is looking the same way she is. His hood is pulled up, the way it always is. She catches glimpses of ravaged flesh when she cares to look, leaking wisps of smoke like he will eventually burn entirely away. They don't need to be here, watching the skyline darken to match the buildings silhouetted against it. They don't need to be, but they are.

 

They have an assignment tomorrow. Sleep would be a more intelligent use of this time.

 

She has a feeling neither of them do that very often.

 

She wonders how alike they are, in this. He has some vestige of someone else living in him, though he would prefer nobody to notice. It screams his fury and cries his pain, where he should have neither left. It breathes in his revenge, the need for it that led him to Talon's embrace.

 

When her eyes flick back to him, he is shifting and uncertain, like he is not quite solid. She cannot tell where the sky ends and he begins. She does not ask. He would probably not like her to know, anyway.

 

They liken him to a beast; some bird of death. They all make comparisons, but she knows he is a crow, screaming murder to anyone who will hear it, picking apart at what remains of life after it has ended. He doesn't screech now though. He doesn't say a word.

 

A moth collides with the light. She hears the tiny body hit the ground, if only because there is nothing better to listen to.

 

"Together." Gerard affirms, clasping Amelie's hand in his own.

 

Widow frowns deeper, her heart thrumming faster than it should.

 

It is only the Crow, grating voice and all. It is only the two of them and the skyline, and the railing holding them from it. If she has had any reaction, the man has not noticed, or doesn't care. She shouldn't either. She doesn't.

 

This should be reported to her superiors. She should be sent for reconditioning. These thoughts are unstable, she should be rid of them immediately.

 

She considers the cold room with the metal chair, the hundreds of needles and scalpels and screens. She considers the words they will tell her, such obvious lies until they have bounced back so many times she cannot stop hearing them. The cold takes root in her lungs, the metal leeches her impurities away, the needles are her gospel, clean and true.

 

There is something left that echoes a feeling that doesn't quite reach her. Something akin to fear, it is animalistic and wild and fervent, but it is all these things behind so many walls she can only barely hear the muffled shouts. She disregards it after a moment. This is what makes her better than her fellow humans: these pitiful echoes do not control her.

 

Amelie wonders if this imperfection is even theirs to take, though. She has given everything to her work. Perhaps she can keep this, if only for a moment. Just to examine it. To understand. Does the spider not have free reign over what catches in her web?

 

These thoughts are mutinous and flawed, Widow determines, eyebrows pinched. She will complete the mission, and she will report the fracture in her programming, and it will be fixed.

 

Though, she supposes as she stares ahead, one ought to hear ghosts when conversing with death.

 

-

 

"Lena," He says, and it isn't a question.

 

The cushions on the chair swallow her up– they're worn and probably full of insects and mold, but right now she doesn't care about the potential bugs so much as she just wants someplace to be that feels familiar.

The cots are all too empty, the lockers are all broken and full of things dead people have left behind. The walls are lined with pictures of people who won't come back, people who didn't make it to hear the recall.

 

The rec room is really just a couple of couches and some shelves with books on them. The consoles and games that used to live in here have since been scrapped for parts or stolen. She reasoned that they probably wouldn't have worked after six years of disuse anyway.

 

He fixes her with that look, damn him.

 

She turns to face him, watches as he takes a seat in front of her couch, his back against the armrest. He rubs his eyes under his glasses. She pouts at him, knowing full well what game he's playing.

 

She tries not to crack.

 

He sighs, but otherwise says nothing.

 

"Winstonnnnn," she whines, throwing herself back against the cushions in defeat. Her arms crossed, she huffs. "It was nothing."

 

He looks back at her, only raising an eyebrow in response.

 

"Really! I've been having dreams for ages, you know that." She insists, yanking idly on the shoulder strap of the accelerator. He pointedly notices her do this, and she feels her face flush.

 

"I know the fight in Kings Row affected you, but this is worrying me." She feels another pang at the mention of the event. She can still see the gold and silver of Mondata, lifeless on the concrete. Feel the breath leave her as she hit the roof, the distressed sparking and hissing of the accelerator.

 

Feel herself start to fade, ever so slightly.

 

"I... I screwed up." She says to the ceiling in a defeated tone. She doesn't want to look at the concern on his face. "He's dead, and I lost, and that talon wad is smirking all the way back to her little base." The woman had been sickly purple and more graceful than any dancer she'd ever seen, even as she was aiming to kill. Even as she left bodies in her wake. Worse still, she knew something Lena didn't. Her amber eyes had been dancing with amusement the whole time, some inside joke only she was privy to.

 

"The Widowmaker." He says, eyes pinched and lips pursed. "She is arguably Talon's most prized weapon. You kept her at bay much longer than any of the reports suggest her other victims have. They say she killed Amari."

 

Lena worries at her lip in deliberation, feeling another minor stab at the mention of her old captain. It's a wound that healed years ago, but it's made fresh by everything that's happening. She thinks about McCree, who had arguably cared more than she had for the deceased sniper. Him and his aim, and his dumb hat too. Damn him.

 

She hopes that he's okay. These things only seem to hit her when the world is gearing up to screw her over. She used to think the dreams were actually and truly dreams; silly nightmares that had no consequence. Now...

 

She had no idea where she ended and the rest of eternity began. She hadn't just been lost, she hadn't been at all, and when she had, who could be sure where, or when? Without the accelerator, she's a rowboat in a typhoon. She blinks, and behind her eyelids is Jesse, red as his blood, dusty and coughing up his lungs in an effort to take another breath– one she knows won't come. She's seen everyone die so many times. She should be used to this.

 

Her eyes remember echoes of other memories too, so many over the past month she couldn't remember all of them if she wanted to– which she definitely doesn't. Golden wings and green ribbons and glowing shields mesh together in her mind's eye, forgetting their distinctions as she loses her hold on what they meant. Maybe nothing at all, maybe they were never anything more than nightmares.

 

Just a dream, she thinks, wondering if when she dreamed of that fire in Switzerland it had been a dream then too. Just a dream, even when they started reading off the names of those they managed to pull out. Even when they read off the names of those they hadn't.

 

A dream, but now she'll have to look them in the eye and tell herself that's true.

 

"Speaking of, it appears as if Talon has eyes set on Numbani this Unity Day."

 

"Anything special happening this year?" She asks, grateful for the change in direction.

 

"A Doomfist exhibit is opening in the Overwatch Museum." He says with a hint of distaste. His history with Doomfists is obviously not something he is pleased to find resurfacing, especially if it means a weapon like that is in the sights of a group like Talon, or any similar ones for that matter.

 

"We gonna do something about it?" The question is asked more in jest than anything else. They both already know the answer, but they've never been the types to let old jokes die.

 

He play-punches her shin, feather light and accompanied with a wry smile thrown over his shoulder. She splits into a grin, cheered despite everything.

 

"Guess it's time to be heroes."

 

-

 

Scouting feels strange after all this time.

 

The people of Numbani don't seem particularly interested in her eccentricities, accustomed to odd metal additions and bodily replacements, illuminated components fitting on an omnic or a cyborg. Where most places she would feel like a sore thumb among a crowd of civilians, here she is one of so many people and omnics, strange in their own ways, all metal and flesh and light.

 

That, and she still remembered the lessons she'd been given a half decade ago. Don't act nervous, and to pull that off, don't be nervous. Nobody looks twice at some human milling about the street, even one with silly hair and a glowing bucket on their chest, but a nervous one piques interest. Don't let it. Breathe in, and smile.

 

Amari had taught her a lot of things; she had taught everyone a lot of things, but that wisdom had stuck. A pity her aim's still rubbish.

 

The sheer unity of this place causes something to swell in her chest; a hope she hadn't noticed had faded following Mondata's death. He was an inspiration, and this place lives and breathes his ideals. Omnics live here; actually live here, no war, no disgust. This is what her home could have been, had he lived.

 

She watches a man pull an Omnic along by their intertwined arms, laughing at the resistance playfully. Shakes her head. There's still a chance for this. She just has to be... Patient. The word wrinkles her nose slightly; she's never been known for her ability to wait on anything.

 

Before dropping here they'd argued the benefits of actually trying to disguise themselves, which really just ended up being a discussion of how much inconvenience Lena could put up with. The idea of shoving the accelerator in a bag had come up, as well as trying to hide it under a poncho, but the possibility of being separated from it didn't sit with her, and the poncho would have been murder in this climate. Eventually they both agreed her regular clothes would do.

 

Even without the poncho, she finds herself ducking into shady spots wherever she can find them. Where the wool lining her jacket would be a comfort back home, the midday heat has rendered it a scratchy annoyance. She feels the urge to shuck it off, but she'd have to unbuckle the straps over it, and that would defeat the whole point of their previous argument. Lena prides herself being nothing if not stubborn, so on she plows, internally praying that the Overwatch Museum has an amazing air cooling system.

 

The Talon activity that was detected was minimal, which made it all the more suspicious. Facial recognition on the street cameras had picked up some non- registered citizens and one was matched with someone dead on record, as well as several unlicensed vehicles on the streets near the museum. Athena suspected they would make an attempt on the Doomfist being exhibited today, and Winston hadn't been pleased at the prospect.

 

Lena wonders, perhaps a little childishly, at the idea that the Widowmaker could be carrying out this operation. It's been a good month or so since the last sighting, which just so happened to be in King's Row... There's a part of her that wants nothing more than to get even with the assassin. For Mondata, for everyone else she's killed on and off record, and more selfishly, to prove that she can beat her.

 

The accelerator is solid and unwavering on her chest, not going anywhere. She determinedly pretends she can't still hear the way it had fizzled as she skidded across that roof.

 

She knows it's both unnecessary and dangerous to use the comm line for a check in, especially when the camera in her goggles ensures everything she sees, Winston sees, but the temptation is there. She's too disciplined to give in, of course, so she only sighs as some people moving in and out of the nearby coffee shop shuffle past.

 

An omnic with a green light running down their faceplate has to weave around her, and she tosses out an apology as she continues. The smell of something sweet wafts out of a bakery, and she has to remind herself that she's here on a job. Did she have breakfast? Yeah, she definitely did, but her stomach seems to disagree.

 

She recalls seeing some article about synthetic tongues for omnics that could actually taste; probably years off, but inspiring nonetheless. She wonders about giving the idea to Angela, for Genji's sake. He always said he'd accepted his "new self", and she believed him, but if she were him she wouldn't mind being able to eat reinhardt's cooking again. Then again, all of those artificial sensory systems were expensive and hard for subjects to get acclimated to.

 

Thoughts of Genji only seem to be adding to her nostalgia, but damn she misses her team. It's been years since she's talked to him, talked to most of them, really. And now only a short few weeks later, the world seems to be turning much faster than it was for all the five long years previous.

 

It wouldn't technically be illegal for her to be here, so recognition doesn't concern her so much as someone finding Winston. Athena can pilot a ship, but it would be conspicuous, and with only two to three sets of hands at a given time, it's unsure as to whether the repairs will actually be sufficient. Instead, poor Winston is stuck camping in a van outside the museum. He never fails to grumble about it every time she gives an update. She informs him that no, she has not spotted anything that he hasn't yet, and wonders innocently at the prospect of picking up "fuel in case we have to fight?" He turns that suggestion down, as she knew he would, but it still makes her pout, however jokingly. He makes some snide comments about how outdated the camera system inside the museum is, but otherwise notifies her that nothing has been spotted yet.

 

Something catches her shoulder, and she stumbles for a second as she turns around to apologize again, but the woman doesn't stop walking. Her ebony hair sways as she walks, brisk and professional. Must be in a hurry.

 

Her eyes stay on the woman's back, maybe out of interest, maybe out of curiosity. Maybe simply because the heat is getting to her and the smooth saunter of her steps is like that of a dancer, practiced and rhythmic. her hair is so dark it looks blue, and it's long enough that it ends at her hips even it it's tight ponytail. The thing swings as she turns her head briefly, a twitch of a few centimeters, but it's enough for her earpiece to catch the light. It could just be that she's a dedicated business woman, Lena reasons. After all, she has a briefcase and everything.

 

There's something eerily familiar about the assuredness of her gait. It takes her a moment to wonder why exactly she would be wearing a shawl in this weather.

 

She squints after the woman, unsettled. "Hey," she calls, walking after her with eyebrows pinched. The woman doesn't turn. Her hat is beige and tipped over her eyes, her shawl is grey and unassuming. Her briefcase bobs up and down as she keeps pace.

 

"Hey," she tries again, reaching out to tap the woman's shoulder. "Sorry to be a bother, but I think I might know-"

 

The woman finally turns, and Lena is fixed with an irritated stare. A deep amber, almost golden stare, glinting in the sunlight bouncing off the street. The Widowmaker had been a sickly purple, but there's no doubt in her mind this must be her. The crowds keep rushing, but they are still as cats in wait, each having found a bird to hunt.

 

"Winston," she says, low and cautious.

 

"Keep her occupied, she may not be alone."

 

She almost says "copy," but doesn't risk breaking the silence further. Every person around her could be in jeopardy right now. For all she knows, half of them could be Talon, just waiting for an excuse to pounce. Her eyes flick to the briefcase. She thumbs the trigger to deploy the plasma pistols from her arm guards, not quite pushing it yet. Watch. Wait.

 

Amari had tried to teach her that so many times; why couldn't she have listened at least once?

 

The Widowmaker moves first, but not to attack as she'd been anticipating. Her leg shoots out to trip a human as he tries to shuffle past, and as he stumbles she shoves him at Lena. She tries to twist around him, a third apology on the tip of her tongue, but she doesn't quite make it. The man stumbles into her, and she pushes him off unceremoniously, eyes on her objective. Without another word she runs after the shock of dark hair, weaving through confused pedestrians and leaving the man baffled in her wake.

 

The crowds are too packed for her to blink forward without the risk of landing on someone, and if someone caught sight of the pistols she'd have panic on her hands. She is stuck on foot. An agitated groan escapes her lips, but she keeps running regardless.

 

Winston will be notifying police of combatants in the area by now, and given a window for response time, she should be able to stall until people are evacuated. For now it wouldn't do for her to shoot first, as much as a panic would be helpful to get people to run in the opposite direction.

 

She ducks through the coffee shop as the Widow does the same, shoving chairs and customers aside to keep track of the assassin. She watches her abandon the hat in the direction of a hapless mother attempting to herd her children along. The woman sputters, but neither of them stop to listen.

 

It feels like heartbeats and hours all at once that she is chasing the Widow, but every time she catches a glimpse of those golden eyes she sees Mondata, lifeless and empty. She runs faster. They disrupt everyone in their path, beating back the river of people that refuses to split. Drowning is a real possibility here, but she can't be kept from this. Not when everyone is in danger for her failings.

 

She hears a few shrieks from the end of the street, and it might just be the best sound she's heard all day. Just as the river swept Lena up, it parts around Winston like a jutting stone. The Widow stops dead at the sight of him, but only for the briefest of seconds. Caught between them, she turns, and Lena can almost see the indecision in her eyes. The case clicks open, and long, pale fingers close around what can only be her rifle. She doesn't give her the chance to do anything more, blinking forward into the new space cleared by scared pedestrians. Cars beep at her as she charges for the Widow, but she leaps up onto them like they are stepping stones in a garden.

 

Her fingers close around the grey shawl, but the woman beneath it is tugged away, zipping upwards on a grappling line. She tosses the cloth down in frustration, but old instincts kick in, and Winston knows what to do before she does. He leaps up at the roof, slamming head on into the sniper.

 

The cars are rushing now, and one crashes into the side of the museum in the pandemonium. She hears a window shatter and others rattle, but doesn't inspect the damage. She speeds past the wreck and into the building, scanning for anyone who shouldn't be here.

 

The few people scattered about the building all take off like birds to flight as the roof shatters and Winston drops down. The Widow grapples away from his grasp, and she wonders for a moment why he doesn't give chase, before noticing the two kids. _Damn._

 

The kids finally run in response to whatever Winston said to them, and Lena wastes no time blinking up to where the sniper is perched. Whatever disguise she'd had is now long gone; her pallor is back to the bruised purple, and her scowl is back in place. She would bet she'd be able to find traces of the holo net that had been disguising her unsettling color, but she doesn't look.

 

She will not be the loser again. Though they both know full well their eyes are on the gauntlet, she stage whispers, "Psst!" In her right ear. "Watcha lookin' at?"

 

The visor clicks as it disengages, and the woman is off again, swinging away on her grappling line. Finally, Lena engages the pistols, and revels in the cool flash of blinking forward. After the press of the crowds and cars, this is downright refreshing.

 

She catches glimpses of the second combatant as she zips around the Widow's fire. Winston had told her everything he knew about the Reaper, including the fact that it'd been with Talon forces, but they'd hoped it wouldn't be here. Obviously all that hoping hadn't paid off, but that wasn't anything new.

 

How the police haven't swarmed the place yet she doesn't know. She calls for Winston, and he complies to her request with no other words needed. He throws her at the intruders and she wastes no time laying out fire. The Reaper grinds something out that might be the word "die" but it's too low and grating to be certain, not with gunfire ringing in her ears.

 

Despite that, she can still tell when the thing starts to laugh. It's a horrible sound, like nails on a chalkboard, but worse is the smoke. It swirls about the wraith's feet as it cackles like a crow, and suddenly the rain of bullets goes in every direction as the thing turns, looking as though it is disintegrating and reforming with every shot. She would be captured by fascination if the bullets hadn't been in the equation, but as it is, she cannot afford to stand still.

 

She runs down the likelihood of catching this thing off guard as it shoots wildly, but doesn't get the chance to take the risk before a stray shot catches her in the chest. Her breath catches in her throat as the accelerator beeps in alarm, emergency systems kicking in to mitigate the damage. She ducks behind a display, heart hammering.

 

Her hands shake on the pistols, and she clutches them tighter as though they can stop her from fading. It isn't that serious, she thinks, but the fear doesn't care. Sweat plasters a stray hair to her forehead, and she struggles to think of anything that isn't the beeping. The internal components of the accelerator are moving and rearranging as per their protocol, trying to get back online. The hum of it against her chest is mildly reassuring, and she forces herself to take in her surroundings. And the people huddling beside her.

 

Oh god. These are children. She sees dust on the nose of the smaller one, and wide, watery eyes bore into her. She summons a grin, plastering it onto her face like a shield. Breathe in, and smile.  "Don't worry loves," she says, and her voice only shakes a little bit. "The cavalry's here!"

 

 An excited gasp escapes the boy, and she feels the smile slip as she glances back to Winston. He leaps at the creature in full force, teeth bared- a move that should have taken him down, or at least winded him. Instead, sickeningly, enchantingly, the thing simply _stops being there_ , and the smoke writhes on its way elsewhere like some demon out of a fairytale. She wants to stare on in awe, but years of experience tell her to breathe out and re-assess.

 

"Come on big guy. Get up." She mutters, as if asking nicely could imbue her partner with some second wind. The smoke swirls to a stop a few yards away from the crumpled Winston, riddled with bullets and none the better for that fall from the ceiling. The thing saunters forward, white mask glinting owlishly in the white light.

 

The shotguns click.

 

The glasses give a tiny _crunch_ as the glass and frames both snap.

 

Winston lets out what can only be described as a roar, though she knows he'll deny it later.

 

The beeping finally stops, and the accelerator hums as it starts up again, blue and bright as the sky. This time the smile is genuine, and she whoops as she leaps back into the fray.

 

She peppers the ghost with fire along with an enraged Winston, and the thing seems less like death when it is surrounded. It struggles to keep up with the both of them, and returns to smoke as Winston slams down his fists where a black garbed chest was only a second prior.

 

A glint in her peripheral vision reminds her of the Doomfist, and she is suddenly very aware that she's lost track of the Widowmaker. She finds the assassin creeping around the empty display, and for a second Lena fears she must have gotten it already, but her hands clutch only her rifle.

 

A small voice calls, "Watch out!" And she has to decide on racing to the child and getting them away, or engaging the Widow in combat again.

 

She waits too long.

 

Another shout, from a different child this time, and the widow is flying like a rag doll, flung back by the force of the gauntlet. Lena had no idea the thing was still functioning, to her terror and relief both. No time to worry about it though; she rushes to the downed widow, already recovering with eyes ablaze in fury.

 

Winston's roar takes the assassin aback briefly, but briefly enough for Lena to kick the gun out of her grasp. She wastes no time firing the weapon, watching as the Widow flips gracefully out of the fire before she can redirect the weapon, unused to the kickback. She discards the weapon after a few seconds, making sure to kick it behind her, far out of reach. Just as the thing skids to a halt, the woman is off again, grappling up and through the hole in the roof, the reaper in tow. Winston hauls himself after them, swinging off displays and rafters, but Lena does not.

 

She stumbles to a halt, heartbeat thrumming in her ears, and she belatedly remembers the children. They are dusty and abashed, and the gauntlet is limp when the older boy hands it to her, hissing and spent. She softens at the awed stares, weighing the Doomfist in her arms. She wracks her brain for something to say, tying to remember those interviews she had to do years back.

 

"Ya'know," she starts, willing her voice to be unwavering. "The world could always use more heroes." It feels briefly cheesy, if mildly inspirational, but she knows it to be true in that moment. That's why she's doing this, isn't it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't make promises for the update schedule, but I'm enthusiastic about this fic, so updates will happen when i have the free time to write and edit. This chapter is intended to be introductory, so apologies for the lack of fast paced shippy stuff. Yay slow burn!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is short, which I apologize for! I intend chapter three to be a bit longer, so it might take a little while before I can get it out. I hope you all enjoy!

The hum of the diner is low and comforting after the ominous murmuring of the Talon bases and the piercing staccato beat of gunfire. The coffee isn't noteworthy in any particular way other than the fact that it's more bitter than Ana would've preferred. The cheap stuff is okay, but the shortage of flavored creamer makes the unsatisfactory taste ever more apparent.

She continues sipping at it, of course. She isn't _wasteful_. They both need the caffeine, and they won't be able to truly rest for a while. Besides, being able to drink it in relative peace is nice.

Though tea– that would be nicer.

Morrison looks as grumpy as he's ever looked, though now with a ratty baseball cap tipped over his eyes to make his sour expression even more ridiculous. His cup is nearing empty already, and his eyes flit across the part of the diner he can see without turning every four minutes. The scars across his face pull the scowl in odd directions, but it is still unmistakably that: a deep, unwavering scowl.

"Jack," she sighs, raising her remaining eyebrow at him. "Watching you is giving _me_ wrinkles."

He frowns at the usage of his name, as she'd expected he would. "You can't possibly believe you are the only person named Jack." She'd pointed out several times before, still to no avail. She's familiar with caution, but frankly, the man is paranoid.

He looks ready to say something, but chooses not to start up the same argument they've had six times in the past month. She hopes futilely it's because he's finally conceded to the point, but more likely, he's trying not to draw attention. They were both always stubborn, she ponders as she takes another sip, but the old age makes it seem much more childish than it had felt when they were young and itching to fight.

It's unfortunate how easy it is for them to blend in though, regardless of how convenient it may be for them. A great wealth of people who made it out of the Uprisings were littered with scars and missing limbs, and unlike omnics, these damaged parts couldn't, and still can't, be replaced. Even with people like Angela in the world... Well their recent experiences are a lesson in letting death have its way, as painful as it is.

She wants to prod him again; jokes are always easier than facing the truth of their situation. It's sick, and neither of them have honestly and genuinely talked about it yet. Offhand comments, shaking heads, but not the truth. She is scowling into her cup now too.

Snippets of conversation float by, but her mind refuses to catch onto one. The wait staff move about the modestly sized room, taking plates and orders in a manner so repetitive she can imagine getting hypnotized by it.

If only. That would be preferable to the conversation they inevitably need to have. Morrison scratches his chin, instinctually tracing the path where scar interrupts stubble. "Stop that," she says again, punctuating it with a soft kick in his shin this time. He finally looks at her, and she counts it as a small victory. "You're going to set something on fire with how hard you're glaring."

She stirs her coffee as he takes a moment to respond. The spoon is large for the cup, so the stirring is really just moving it back and forth repeatedly. Sometimes she swears she can see the old gears in his head turning as he pinches up his brows like that.

"I–" he stops. Squints at something over her shoulder.

"What is it?" She presses, trying to discern wether he is being avoidant or there is something actually worth paying attention to behind her. If it is the latter, the both of them craning their necks to see would be pretty damn obvious, so she determines to wait for his response.

He nods at something behind her, and she turns in the booth seat to look. She has to lower the sunglasses covering her tattoo to get a better view, but it's unmistakable regardless. Mounted in the upper right corner of the bar is a screen displaying a news channel, flashing footage of what looks to be a wrecked museum. The din of the customers is too loud to hear over, but the subtitles inform her that there has been an attack in Numbani at the Overwatch Museum, one that some sources claim could be connected to a recent assassination in King's Row. The caster suggests both attacks have the calling cards of Talon involvement, but a correspondent quickly assures the audience that it is highly unlikely.

Screen captures of recovered museum footage note streaks of blue light around the Doomfist exhibit as well as other varying unidentifiable figures, one of which, according to investigations, allegedly fell into the building through the ceiling, and left a sizable crack in the formerly impeccable tile.

Ana finishes off the last dregs of coffee, setting the mug down and lacing her fingers together in front of her. Jack looks unsure as to what expression to make, but his eyes meet hers.

"I think the children are getting themselves in trouble again."

-

"She is a highly accomplished scientist, and we owe it to her, as the remains of Overwatch, to reach out." Angela seems ready to fight tooth and nail on the behalf of her colleague Mei-Ling, which Lena can't help but giggle at.

"Okay. Good choice." Winston says, looking over the profile. "It appears as though she'll need some rehab accommodations, but that's your department."

The doctor looks almost surprised at how little she had to argue, but continues after a moment. "I can arrange for funds to be allocated for travel costs, but we do not have much." Her eyebrows are pinched and lit up by the blue light of her screen, a contrast to the warmly lit motel room behind her. They're all painfully aware of the funding issue, but it's not one that can be solved without government re-approval or corporate sponsorship. The latter is something they all vehemently agree is off the table, which leaves only the former, a task as daunting as it is unlikely.

"Speaking of," Lena pipes up, reminded of her own suggestion she'd been meaning to bring to the table. "I've been contacted by an interested party! You know Lúcio?"

"The musician?" Winston asks.

"That's the one." She affirms. "He's been expressing support for Overwatch activity aver since the museum incident on social media. I've been in talks with him about affiliating himself with us."

"Dos Santos. Direct affiliation would garner much-needed public favor..." Angela considers, "but it says he has an upcoming tour. His career as an artist could become an issue for scheduling, as well as putting potential audience members in jeopardy if he's targeted."

"Even then," Lena concedes, "having someone like him voicing approval publicly is huge. With the omnium activity on top of groups like Talon, I'm not even sure how viable a world tour is. If it gets bad, we know we have him on our side, yeah?"

"Good. That should be beyond helpful in the funding department, but with the Reaper still free we should be cautious about this stuff. We still don't know it's, or Talon's, plans, so if we're actually beginning recruitment of outside forces we should tread as carefully as we can. The remaining agents are already on thin ice." Winston rubs his temple.

"But," he says, tone considerably more hopeful, "the Russian special defense division has expressed interest in our aid. Given time to gather our resources and fix things up, we may have a new potential alliance."

"We should also be cautious in this. We have had governments attempt to take advantage of our unique assets before." Angela frowns. "But in and of itself, the interest is good. The desperateness on the other hand, is worrisome. The situation looks to be escalating, and the idea that the Russian government is willing to look for outside help suggests things are growing dire."

The doctor frowns deeper, before making an attempt at consolation with a, "Well I suppose that is why we are here, is it not?" Lena responds to Angela's apologetic smile with a crooked grin. They hadn't worked together terribly closely back in the day; Overwatch had been a large organization, but there's a new camaraderie that can be felt for just having made it out of the organization's downfall. And now, taking part in it's comeback.

"Well, you're not wrong." Winston gives a small chuckle, adjusting his glasses to read over a message on the secondary display not occupied by Angela's tired face. "Torbjorn is en route to base, apparently."

The doctor's face lights up in reminder. "Ah, yes. I should be able to arrive at–"

"I do not intend to interrupt, but there is a solitary human heat signature approaching my perimeters." Athena's smooth monotone cuts in.

Everyone starts, but before Winston or Angela respond, Lena is already on her feet, grabbing her comm off the mess of a work desk and clipping it on. She's not incapable of sitting through a conversation like this, but after the museum incident and subsequent escape of the Talon agents she's been eager to get on her feet and do something, and this, however small, is better than sitting around dwelling on thinks they've already discussed at length.

Besides, she thinks, even if it turns out to be some desperately lost door-to-door salesman, it gives her an excuse to get some air. She is without a visor or her jacket, or even her armguards, so she'll have to carry her pistols in hand.

"I'll investigate. Sorry love, but you're a bit conspicuous." Winston looks like he's about to protest, but thinks better of it. He gives a nod, then commands Athena to pull up security feeds.

"I don't need to remind you, but radio if you need backup. Be careful." He says to her in parting, and she returns him with a mock salute on her way out the door.

Gibraltar is haunting at this time of night, large and keen to echo every scuffle of every rodent, as well as every quiet footstep. The metal storehouses and upper walkways loom and groan when the wind batters at them, but tonight the air is relatively still aside from a weak breeze coming off the water. All the better to hear the intruder.

The cliffs and ocean around the base make approaching it a feat of bravery to an assailant on foot, so she reasons either the intruder is well aware how understaffed they are, thinks the place to be uninhabited, or intends no harm. She can't very well bet on that last one, though she hopes for it anyway.

She treads as lightly as she can without hindering her speed more than necessary, but she still winces as the grass crunches underfoot. The stuff clings to the cliff everywhere it can hold on, and the stretch of land outside the base is now a sea of green, thriving in the absence of inhabitants. It ripples in waves as she scans for movement, squinting along the fence line. A rattle catches her attention, and then a soft clang; something hitting the gate.

Her hold on the pistols tightens as she draws closer, peering between the fence bars for a better look at the figure. She can tell it's tall, and it looks to be slumped against the fence. Something wrapped around it flutters as another breeze dances past. Her eyes widen when she finally makes out the hat.

"Jesse!"

She's running over in an instant, caution forgotten. He looks up at the name, and her heart stops.

He's only got one eye. When she blinks she can't help but see a dusty road, cracked and weathered under a too orange sky. The flutter of a bird she can't see taking flight.

She radios for Athena to open the gate in a haze, rushing to the gunslinger the instant she can fit through. She wants to hit herself when she realizes he still has both eyes, but it looks to be a very near thing. There's a deep cut in his left eyebrow, and the blood looks to have seeped down over his cheek and into his beard. It's no wonder he's keeping it closed, the blood's dried in the eye socket and made the whole left side of his face look like a giant wound.

"Oxton?" He asks as she leads him into base. One pistol shoved into her thankfully oversized pocket, she's supporting a good bit if his weight as they walk.

"Ya got me," she affirms. "Close 'em up, love," she says to Athena. The gate squeals as it starts sliding shut, but she's paying a great deal more attention to how ragged his breaths are.

"Been an age," he starts, then stops to cough. She tells him not to strain himself, but knows he won't listen even as she says it. The walk back into the complex feels like it takes eternities, but as McCree gets his bearings, he seems more eager to hold himself upright, even when it's probably not the best idea. Nonetheless, it helps get him to Winston faster, which she's thankful for. She hasn't gotten a good look at him yet, but between the coughing and the blood, it doesn't sound like he's in top notch shape.

"Lena-" Winston starts as they burst in, but she doesn't stop to talk until she's gotten Jesse to sit. He tosses off the hat, which flops down on top of a toolbox in the corner. She looks under a few tables for the first aid kit before flushing as she realizes that Winston already has it. Of course he would– why didn't she think of that? He would have been watching the security feed.

"Y'all got any water?" Jesse pipes up as Winston gets a better look at the eye. Lena immediately turns to the fridge, looking for something to do with herself that isn't staring at all the blood...

She's seen blood before. This isn't new.

A dusty road, cracked and faded. A fluttering bird, but when she looks up, there's nothing but the rusty sky. The click of a gun.

_Dream_ , she insists to herself. _Nightmare_.

She handles the plastic bottle mechanically, shutting the mini fridge door harder than strictly necessary. Jesse takes it with a smile, and she can see that he has a split lip that makes him wince as the expression pulls on it.

Winston asks questions, and Jesse answers. Angela cuts in from time to time with suggestions, and questions of her own. It's all garbled. Lena can only taste the dust in the air, can't see anything but the blood, dark and deep and oh, so red.

A gun cocks. She looks up. Nothing. Just the conversation that warbles thinly around her, unintelligible and hazy.

Her heartbeat is a drumming in her ears, too fast and too slow at once. She shakes her head. Runs a hand through her hair. She's sweating– from carrying McCree in, she tells herself. Definitely from that.

Dream. They're all dreams. They're not– they're not real. They never happened. They never will.

They are not. Real.

Jesse lets out a wry laugh that turns into another cough. His hand comes away red from his face. She's never been a good liar.

-

Lena Oxton smiles at the interviewer, nodding along to everything that is said to her. Her face is dusted with freckles that play up her youth, which proves to be a massive aid in conversing with press. Even the older videos showcase her easy charm and her talent for getting anyone around her to laugh, as though her bubbly nature is simply infectious.

Widow does not laugh.

She pages through tabs of research on a tablet as she walks away from the conference room. The Reaper trails behind her, carrying an air of dejection. Even with his expressions hidden, the beast carries his heart on his sleeve. It's almost painful, watching his emotions wash over him and batter him this way and that like the tide batters so many rocks. Unlike rocks though, he doesn't ever seem to be made smoother by the experience.

Pitiful.

The hallways are dim at this time of night; everyone is either sleeping or out on assignment, leaving only a spare few meandering around the darkened hallways. The labs and cells are likely to be well manned even at this hour, but the personnel quarters are left relatively silent. She finds it refreshing.

The guard shift should be changing around now, she thinks, eyeing the time. The hallway to her temporary quarters is coming up, and she prepares to depart wordlessly with her... He isn't a partner. There must be a word for what he is to her, but it does not come, nor does she spend any outstanding amount of effort searching for it.

"Hey," he grinds out, all roughness and impatience. She turns only enough to send him a glance, and not a centimeter more.

"I thought I recognized you when they paired us, but I couldn't remember from where." He says, accusation in his tone. He is tense. The meetings always make him angry; she suspects his pride bruises at being told what to do.

She blinks once, languid and condescending.

"You're Lacroix, aren't you." He asks, but it isn't a question.

Yes. No. She frowns before she can stop herself. Another fracture. She shouldn't have done that. A weakness.

An image of Tracer laughs silently on the tablet, and the name hangs over her like a shroud. Does he expect her to hate him for this? Does he expect sadness? She has none of those things to give, but if that's true, why the scowl? If that's true, why is she still slipping up?

If that's true, why does it hurt?

"It is of little consequence." She says smoothly. Her voice is like silk, but her hold on the tablet is too firm now. The frown deepens.

A guard brushes past them, confirming her theory about the shift change. She doesn't remove her eyes from Reyes, though. His hoodie is old and battered, and likely stolen. He could request Talon provide him fresh garments any time, but he hasn't gotten rid of it. It will cease to be functional soon. There's no good reason for him to hold onto it.

"You're doin' this the same reason I am, huh?"

She considers him. He is a creature of spite and vengeance. His old wants and needs and ties pull him along like a puppet, and he follows willingly. He uses old names and wears old sweaters and clings to old sentiments, like if he loses these things he will cease. It's not entirely untrue, but that fear weakens him. He is a veritable master at the art of killing, but his utter failure to master himself has left him sloppy and fallible.

No, she thinks. She is nothing like him.

This would be the wrong thing to say to him, though. He will suit her much better if he considers them allies, and drawing attention to their differences wouldn't be conducive to that end. They both have jobs to do, after all.

He has nothing left in him but a primitive desire for revenge. For the kill. She wonders if that is his only reverie; if the clap of his shotgun is the sound of joy. Perhaps that is the only time the tempest of his emotions and his wants and his needs are finally calm– perhaps they are not dissimilar, in this.

"After a fashion." She says, and it is not a lie. It isn't a truth; it isn't close to a truth, but most things aren't, regardless of how earnest the people saying them are.

He seems satisfied with this. She watches his back as he walks away, the edges of him blurring as he passes through the shadows in the hall. He will pry her more come the morning, but for now the base hums quietly, and silence reigns supreme.

-

"Try again." Ana says. She's regal as ever, eyes sharp and lips set in a half smile– a smile that makes Lena's heart hurt. She takes a moment to realize the woman isn't talking to her.

She takes another moment to remember that Ana Amari is dead.

The woman Ana is instructing stands straighter, and aims her rifle. Her ebony hair sways when she moves, so dark it looks blue, and the one eye she has open is a brown so rich it could be amber. Lena feels like she should know this woman, like there's a name on the top of her tongue that refuses to make itself known. She watches the woman's back as she pulls the trigger.

She never hears the shot hit; never hears anything except the captain's voice.

"Better." Amari says, pacing away from the trainee. She gives Lena a considering look, who had forgotten she was here at all. "You could learn a thing or two from Frenchie over here." She says, and the words are light and playful. The way her stare pierces Lena to the core is not.

"Cap–" she starts, then chokes on the word halfway through. She can't speak, can't move, can't do anything but sputter and wheeze as the two walk away from her. Lena closes her eyes.

And she is faced with Mondata, a bullet through his neck and the lights on his faceplate extinguished. The omnic clatters to the ground gracelessly, despite her efforts to catch him. Ana is gone, and so is the woman, but the Widowmaker stares down at her, her sickly purple skin shining in the harsh white light. She laughs, and the sound is the same as bullets firing. The same as death.

"Why?" She finds herself asking. "Why would you do this?" They are on a rooftop– no, a stage. They are on a stage, and her voice sounds tiny as it reverberates around her, as though it will shatter at the slightest breeze.

The stage lights are cold on her shoulders. She can hear the murmur of an audience, but she cannot see it. There's only the Widow, eyes glinting with a malicious glee under the spotlights. Lena's heart is running a mile a minute, but she cannot move from this spot. A sickly smile, and her dark lips are a bruised purple. Golden eyes, feline eyes, watching her like she's nothing but prey, bleeding and helpless. Maybe she is. Maybe that's all she'll ever be.

_Lost_.

She's in a plane, and she's pressed every button she can think of, and she knows in her gut she is about to die. She sucks in one last breath and just as the crash hits, the world shatters. She is everywhere and nowhere at every time and no time at all, and she had no idea how cold it would be to simply not exist. The spotlights are stars, and she is weightless, and when she looks down her body flickers.

"No one will come for you." The Widow says. Her nails draw blood from Lena's cheek, yet the touch manages to be gentle despite it. The cut burns, but not as deeply as her words.

_"No one came for me."_

Lena's eyes shoot open, only to see nothing. Her heart feels as though it might burst from her chest, and it's all she can do to rip off the tangled sheets and force herself upright. She stumbles out of the cot mindlessly, looking for any source of light she can find. Her eyes adjust after a minute of bumbling around, but not before stumbling into a bed frame and then promptly kicking the damn thing, as though that'll make up for the bruise she'll have later.

She crouches to rummage around under the bed, fingers closing around the fabric of her jacket like it's a lifeline. More importantly though, under the jacket lies the accelerator. For maybe the millionth time in her life, she thinks it must be the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. She shrugs on the jacket and hugs the accelerator close to her chest, taking it with her into the small kitchen.

She shuffles around in the dim light for a few minutes, accelerator under one arm and the other scratching her face. They'd never had much in the way of perishables here, even when the base was manned, but now there's really only powdered coffee and peanut butter, and a couple other straggling foodstuffs still hiding in the back of the shelves. She considers putting on a pot, but quickly decides against it as she glances at the time on the microwave.

There was a box of some off brand wheat cereal here a few days ago, if she recalls. She crouches down to look in a lower cabinet, squinting at the spot where the cereal box should have been in bleary confusion.

Something to her right bumps, and she's on her feet immediately, the edges of her vision going ever so slightly blue in preparation to blink away from the threat. She can't fight while she has the accelerator under one arm; her only options are to drop it or run, and she isn't about to risk the chance of getting pulled away from it for an extended period of time...

Her rush of thoughts stops dead as she comes to the belated realization that it's only Jesse. He's leaning against the counter in clean Overwatch-issue sweats chewing a toothpick in place of a cigar.

"Woah there, gov'ner." He smiles crookedly, hands out and open palmed as if a peace offering.

"Thought you'd be sleepin'." Lena exhales. She kicks the cabinet shut, running a hand through her hair. Setting the accelerator down on the counter she props herself up to sit next to it, letting her legs dangle off the side. "You _should_ be sleepin'." She squints.

He shrugs, and then tries not to look pained at the movement. "Pot accusing the kettle way I see it." He tosses back, eyebrow raised. He reminds her of Reyes when he does that and crosses his arms, like he's some brooding impassive judge. The half grin on his face ruins the image though, and she returns it gratefully. She's had enough ghosts in the past few months to deal with; she doesn't need another.

"I'm not the one who got here black and blue and red all over." She replies, trying to appear smug.

"What can I say? 'Lotta people would pay a high price for this face. Must be my dashing good looks." His arrival at the watch post comes flooding back, and she eyes all of his bandages again, watching for spots of red.

"Gettin' too old to deal with a few bounty hunters?" She quips, hoping the joke lands lightly. She can't be sure he'll take their old banter the same way; it has been the better part of a decade after all, and they're both different people now, for bette or for worse.

"Should'a seen the other guy." He winks, and she lets out a breath at the silent affirmation. She'd refused to admit to herself how much she'd missed him, especially with so much up in the air. Nobody could ever truly be sure if they were safe, and many of them weren't safe enough to lament about it later.

She refuses to admit, even to herself, that the memories– dreams. They're just dreams. She refuses to admit that the dreams had had an impact on her. McCree smiles, and she can't stop seeing that orange sky. Peacekeeper is tucked away in a locker, but she can still her the sound it made as he pulled the trigger.

But that never happened. He's here, they're both here, and they're both still breathing. The sky is dark, and she can hear the waves crashing against the cliffs. She breathes out slowly. She is here.

She tells herself that as they part for the night, both agreeing to make attempts at sleep. She tells herself that as she tucks the accelerator under her bed again, hiding the glowing display under her jacket. She tells herself that as she has to convince herself that it's okay to stop holding onto it, that it's okay to close her eyes again.

She tells herself that, even as she can still hear the ringing echoes of the Widowmaker's laugh.

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

Lena squints at the heat mirages coming off the metal roofs, raising a hand to shield her eyes as she stares out across the base even with her sunglasses perched on her nose. If she intended to stay out here any longer she'd have to consider putting on sunscreen, or at least resign herself to a burn. Gibraltar, for everything it has going for it, is dearly lacking in shade.

 

While Winston has been keeping up the security of the inner buildings, the outer ones are managed mostly by Athena, who suggested some of them were in want of cleaning and repairs. They were about to be hosting several agents, as well a certain outlaw with a high bounty on his head, after all. On top of that, Talon's eyes seem to be set on Overwatch, so it struck everyone as prudent to beef up security. With Winston keeping tabs on the still-healing Jesse, as well as taking care of the technical side of the afore mentioned beefing up, Lena was stuck with the grunt work. 

 

She doesn't mind overmuch, but the sun is high with few clouds to provide relief, and she feels like she's walking in an oven every time she has to leave the shade. Her bag of assorted tools and broken down cameras she'll need to bring back to Winston clinks as she walks, and she taps a beat on the accelerator along with the rhythm. The damn thing feels about twice as heavy as it has any right to be, and a layer of sweat is forming under the loose tank top where the harness rests on top of it. 

 

Despite the heat she makes quick work of the last two cameras, though she has to get creative to reach the one mounted outside the warehouse. Luckily the designers had included a surplus of catwalks, so she rarely finds one she'd actually require a ladder to get to. Usually dragging a crate to step on does the trick, but she does make a tally of the ones she can't realistically get to on her own. She'll just have to get Winston to lug a ladder around for her or something. 

 

The last two thankfully only require a bit of dusting off, and after Winston gives the all-clear she begins making her way back. She ends up taking a rather roundabout route just to avoid the sunlight, and to a lesser degree, to enjoy the quiet. The waves lap against the cliffs at a leisurely pace, calm and repetitive. She would take the time to bask in the serene-ness of it all if it wasn't so damn hot. 

 

Angela hadn't given specific times, but she was set to arrive today, and Lena finds herself looking out at the fence, trying to pick out a flash of blonde from the backdrop of blues and greens. One of Athena's security drones whirs past, but otherwise nothing happens, and she resumes her walk back to the main building.

 

It turns out to be about two or so hours later that the doctor arrives, eager to get out of the sun with her blond hair tied up as best she could get it. A few strands had fallen out regardless though, and she brushes them back idly as they make their way to the part of base Lena refers to as "actually habitable." She can't spot a wrinkle on her perfect face after all this time, but she says nothing. 

 

Angela sets to work on Jesse's wounds as soon as she sees him, rushing about with bandages and popping open cases of her equipment, the med-packs looking to Lena as if someone had managed to liquefy sunlight. They always had, even back in the prime years of Overwatch, but she hadn't laid eyes on one for years now. It only occurs to Angela to give proper warm greetings after she's done stitching up McCree, and she gives them all hugs, though Jesse's is probably more ginger than necessary. 

 

It's only a handful of days later that Reinhardt arrives, and his hugs are decidedly less cautious. McCree wears grin the entire time regardless, and Bridgette informs them all that she's had her ear talked off many times about them, which Lena takes as a compliment. Winston hits it off instantly with the mechanic, and they launch into a detailed discussion about shield generators that Lena loses her grasp on about two sentences in. She notices a pointed look between Angela and Reinhardt over Bridgette's shoulder, and chooses not to comment. 

 

Torbjorn and Mei arrive on the same day nearly a week later, though at different times. Reinhardt and Torbjorn waste no time in launching into an insult match, which Mei Ling wonders about when she hears it upon setting down her things. Angela and Lena both assure her it's just their way of having a conversation. The scientist furrows her brows in confusion, but nods in acceptance. 

 

This all means they need food, and good amount of it, so Lena and Jesse end up venturing off-base in a rusty work truck with the goal of grocery shopping. Some protest had been raised at the idea of Jesse going out, but to his credit he was healing well, enough so that he was cleared for most work, and he quieted some of the worry by agreeing to a disguise. The disguise turns out to be a pair of glasses and a fresh shave, paired with a shirt that for once isn't a flannel. She finds herself a little impressed at how different the gunslinger looks, but there's not much to be done for the prosthetic except pulling the sleeve of his shirt over it, which he grumbles good-naturedly about. 

 

Lena on the other hand ends up in an oversized hoodie and hair that she doesn't want to admit feels wrong un-mussed. The store is blissfully cool, and she and Jesse argue about national dishes for the entire trip, stopping only to survey the list or debate splurging on this purchase or that one. They mostly hold true to the mare minimum that was requested, largely non-perishables and seasonings that aren't salt and sugar substitute, but they do end up with several moon pies to satisfy a pastry debate, which Lena knows Angela will disapprove of. Apparently it's an affront to "taste as a medium" that she hasn't had one or something. 

 

The base is considerably less eerie with more people around; Bridgette has set up in one of the warehouses so as not to disturb people with her work, and between Mei Ling and Angela the labs are being used again, which Lena knows Winston is happy about. Between the shouting and the hammering and the screech of equipment as it's pushed around to suit people's needs, the place feels alive again. 

 

Which is why she's so unnerved when the truck rumbles to a halt and none of those sounds can be heard.

 

It would be fine if they were only in the outer complex, but the main building is quiet. No shouts or clanging of metal, and most damning of all, nobody to greet them when they step out of the truck. The window above where they parked is large, and if Winston were just invested in his work he would have seen them from there and at least mentioned it. Reinhardt had been raising complaints about food all day, and he'd been the main contributor to the list. She had a hard time believing he wouldn't come out to inspect the haul, and then insist on carrying half, if not all of it in. 

 

Yet. Nothing. 

 

She frowns, wondering if they were just having a meeting. It would be odd for an Overwatch business discussion to happen without them, and considering that they have all the food, it isn't just a gathering for a meal. If they'd been targeted or there were enemies in the area, they, or Athena would have said something. So that means they're preoccupied with an emergency, or she's letting paranoia get to her. 

 

She wouldn't put it past any of them to just be oddly quiet; it is a large base, even just considering the main building, and there's only six of them not counting Athena. But, she reminds herself, it's always paid to be cautious, even when you'd prefer not to be. A small voice recalls that she was cautious that night in King's Row too, but Mondata still ended up dead. A louder voice tells her to square her shoulders and keep calm. That one sounds suspiciously like that of Captain Amari.

 

"Athena," she taps her comm, deliberately casual. There's no point in being quiet; they just rolled up in a dingy sputtering work truck that's only seen maintenance in the last two weeks since Bridgette started fixing it up. Anyone with eyes would have them trained on her and Jesse by now. "How're things going?"

 

"My algorithms suggest you would not believe my response, so instead, in the interest of time conservation, I would direct you to the door." Comes her smooth reply. Lena frowns, then nods to Jesse, who pulls Peacekeeper out of the glovebox. He doesn't turn the safety off, nor does he rest his finger on the trigger, but the fact that it's in his hand to begin with speaks volumes. They figured the one weapon was enough, so she is without arms to keep at the ready. Instead she hefts a bag with a tub of powdered coffee, preparing to make a fool of herself trying to swing it at someone. 

 

The door slides open. 

 

An array of half finished sentences and exclamations meet them, all tinted with a tone of concern, or maybe anger. She can't tell. The workshop echoes with the reverb, voices all fighting to be heard over one another. She and Jesse relax a bit at the realization that there doesn't seem to be an intruder, but the concern is still there. Did someone get injured? Is this a personal argument? 

 

People are standing about among the tables and desks, and she takes a quick count of everyone before doing anything else. All six... When had Angela gotten shorter? 

 

The room quiets when they enter, and the figure that she's certain isn't Angela looks up. 

 

Lena takes an involuntary step back. 

 

"Listen," Ana Amari starts. 

 

-

 

It's going well, Ana thinks.

 

The guards are out, the lights are low, the dealer is down, and the Reaper is in her sights. Him being here is just the cherry on top; they've been raiding Talon arms dealers for months, mapping where they get their supplies and parts and making attempts to weaken them where they can. 

 

He's a dark blotch against the metal and concrete of the warehouse, the low glow of the lamps and the light streaming in from outside only barely illuminating his form. He'd seem invisible as he passes through the wells of shadow, except for that brilliant white mask; a beacon against a sea of ink. She' wouldn't be much of a sniper if she had trouble picking him out against the shadows though, and she keeps her finger light on the trigger. Gabriel approaches the collection of crates cautiously; he's no doubt taken note of the silence. 

 

She watches him tense as he moves around the crate, finding the limp form of the dealer. He grabs his weapons the second he sees the dart, there is no doubt in her mind. It's too late though, because the next one is already flying. 

 

He's noticed her by then, so she's on the move before he can decide to go after her. The crack of his shotguns fill the air, and the quick beat of rifle fire is soon to join. He fights, she'll give him credit, but between the two of them he doesn't last. She throws a biotic grenade, and he staggers from the poison. She's not taking chances. Not anymore. 

 

It's a helix rocket to the back that sends him sprawling, his shotguns clattering to the concrete floor. She kicks the one nearest to her away, and it skitters loudly in the new silence. 

 

He rifle aimed and her finger on the trigger, she approaches. The Reaper looks up, and it's only then that with a twist of her gut she realizes that the mask had been knocked off. 

 

Gabe is a corpse. There's no way around it. 

 

She's seen people die, seen friends and coworkers and enemies die. All sorts who deserved it and those who didn't. Her business had been that of death, regardless of the trappings, but this isn't the same as looking at a dead body. This is watching someone fall apart before your eyes, watching them decay and rot and crumble, and then watch the pieces left pull themselves together again. There's nothing like it, nothing at all. 

 

He looks at her. 

 

There's a word on his lips, or what's left of them, that he doesn't manage to say. 

 

It's only when he's already gone and smoke that she realizes that she never pulled the trigger. Its only when Jack screams that she understands that realization. Her heart stops cold. 

 

The Reaper isn't even humanoid; it's a shadow with claws, and it's opened Jack from collarbone to hip. She aims her rifle, and she shoots to kill. 

 

-

 

_"how have you been feeling?"_

 

The doctor adjusts her thin glasses on her thin nose as she asks the question, a tick that she's repeated for the last twenty minutes incessantly. Widow finds it irritating, but she makes no comment, nor expression. 

 

For seven years she has been asked this question by different people in different lab coats with different glasses perched on their different noses. They all had different names and different faces and different ways of phrasing the same words, but they are all so similar they blur into one another.

 

The woman sits with one leg crossed over the other, her immaculate slacks being wrinkled by the position. Her coat is brilliantly white beneath the cold lighting. Widow could kill her with the pen in her breast pocket, as well as the two guards outside. 

 

_How have you been feeling?_

 

She dislikes this question. It is pointless. They know exactly how she is feeling; they designed her feelings meticulously with scalpels and needles and wires. They set them in stone with screams and uttered words, they sealed them tight with a gun in her hands. There's no feeling except the kick of her rifle as she pulls the trigger. 

 

She thinks of the museum and the failure, thinks of that balcony with the moths and the way the Reaper had nodded in solemn agreement. The word _"together"_ sits on her tongue, bitter and old. 

 

_How have you been feeling?_

 

The question is a shallow trap, naturally. They aren't listening for an answer, they're watching for expression, for increased heart rate, for an errant twitch. She betrays none of these things, but a sardonic smile wants to make its way onto her lips. It doesn't quite, but the thought is there. She used to wonder what would happen if she answered. Used to. She learned that lesson fast. 

 

Weapons don't feel.

 

She hears Oxton's laughter, ringing in her head like a bell. The girl is impossible and challenging and everything she hasn't encountered in a long while, and she was very nearly beaten by her. Her brown eyes had watered behind her visor, grief stricken and furious. It had proven to be her defeat. 

 

And yet. 

 

_How have you been feeling?_

 

She fixes the woman with a stare, letting the silence speak for itself. The psychiatrist nods, tapping something on her tablet. She watches the doctor leave, impassive and unmoving. She hadn't lied. But, Amelie thinks despite herself, It wasn't the truth. It wasn't anywhere near the truth.

 

Does the spider not have reign over what catches in her web?

 

"After a fashion." She hears herself say. It was a different night, with a different person, but they're all becoming so similar they blur into one another. It was a lie, then. When had that stopped being true?

 

She's alone, but the question hangs in the air, accusing and cold.

 

-

 

 

The parking lot is run down and ridden with weeds, only one light still working to guide them. She has to lean him against the side of the car as she breaks the window with the end of his rifle, wincing at the alarm but too desperate to be deterred. She presses a obutton on the stolen key to disarm it, and prays that the bodyguard hadn't been some major wanted criminal. She did not need to deal with police on top of it all. 

 

Part of her is glad to have escaped with her life, and at least some of Jack's, but another part reprimands her for failing to kill him. She feels a girl again, scared and sweaty and covered in someone else's blood. There's a reason she has one eye; she'd thought she would be better than this by now. 

 

It takes minutes to retrieve the supplies they hadn't taken into the warehouse, but it feels too long when she knows Jack is alone and bleeding. She can't afford to just bandage him up in the middle of a parking lot that the Reaper, however injured, could still be lurking near. It's a big enough risk to leave him alone as is. 

 

Ana shakes her head as she climbs into the driver's seat, doing her best not to stare at the bloody mess that's become of Jack. She'd jammed three healing darts into his thigh before doing anything else, but it doesn't looks to be enough. There's blood on his face from where he absentmindedly touched it with his hand, and it makes the tear tracks painfully visible. It's some kind of terrible miracle that he's even still awake. She wonders if it could be some affect of the experiments, or if he's just that damn stubborn. 

 

Knowing him, likely an even mix of both. 

 

He makes a sick choking sound as she car lurches into motion, and it only solidifies what she has to do. She feels a little guilty for making the decision without him, but what other choice is there? She's not about to let him die for his pride or his stupid regrets, and definitely not for her hesitance. They can't be seen at any hospitals, and knowing Talon they would be intercepted by agents even if the personnel themselves didn't notify police. There's no convincing alibi for either of them, and they can't risk being searched. Especially with the soldier experiments, even if no fuss was raised by the grace of some deity, medical information on him is both illegal and a huge tip-off. Her brow scrunches at the thought of that information getting into anyone's hands, no matter how well intentioned. 

 

She steels herself and drives south. 

 

It's about twenty minutes in that she really takes note of the beaded bracelet dangling from the rearview. Its all plastic and yarn in garish colors that the thinks Oxton would have liked. She was always a sucker for this stuff. 

 

It's forty minutes in that she realizes the beads have flakes of glitter inside them when a passing light illuminates them. She wonders who made it. 

 

It's three hours in that she rips it off the rearview and shoves it in the backseat where she won't have to stare at it. 

 

The radio has nothing good, but she puts it on anyway. She tries to find something she'll be too annoyed to fall asleep to, and has to settle for a play by play of a sport she can't discern in a language she can't understand. It takes an hour and a half for her to switch to some pop station. It's sometime around one-thirty in the morning that she stops on the side of the road to kick off the license plates. She uses a knife to unwind the screws where she has to, and she puts the plates in the trunk. Gets back in. Keeps driving. 

 

Jack is sometimes awake and sometimes not, but every question he has either doesn't come out or is paired with a cough that makes her reprimand him for trying with his injury. She answers what she feels he won't argue with, and ignores him when she knows he won't like the answer. 

 

Every once in a while she uses one of the healing canisters he carries, and they reach the last one at three in the morning. She stops to go into a convenience store at five. She keeps the sunglasses down, too aware how peculiar is must look. Several stops to add more bandages and one to get up and stretch her legs later, the sun rises to silhouette the Rock of Gibraltar. In her tired state she squints at it as if she can pick out the squat metal buildings perched on its side from this far away, but predictably to no avail. 

 

It takes barely under an hour to get to the Rock and approach the Watchpoint, and by then Jack is fully awake and trying to raise protest once he recognizes the cliffs. He looks ready to argue despite everything, so she looks him in the eye and states as clearly as she can: "You're dying, Jack. I'm not letting that happen, even if you insist on being an ass." She pauses to turn left, then resumes speaking once they're on a straighter road again. "Don't respond. You'll irritate the wound further, and I will not have you die on salvation's doorstep." 

 

He takes a breath, clearly ready to respond anyway, but coughs up blood before any words come out. He tries to wipe it away, but it leaves a smear across his chin. He is silent for the rest of the ride aside from his ragged breathing. 

 

The Watchpoint is old and looks abandoned, but there are telltale signs when she looks for them. The security camera lenses are clean, and there are dents in the grass where something large trampled over it and through the gate. She's had hours upon hours to come up with something to get them open, but for all her deliberating she simply steps out of the car and removes her hood for the camera.

 

The gates creak as they open. 

 

- 

 

Lena bites her lip for the thousandth time that afternoon. They're carrying in the groceries, muttering to each other in passing. The world doesn't stop, even when the dead drop by for a visit, and that means perishables still can't be left in the car. Reinhardt gets the bulk of it, but she and McCree carry in the more fragile stuff, knowing him a little too well. 

 

The kitchen is filled with halfhearted small talk and the opening and closing of cabinets. Everyone's antsy; only having been given the bare minimum of information before Angela insisted on treating their injuries. While they all begrudgingly agreed it was better that they have the time to heal and clear their heads (and regain consciousness, in Morrison's case), it feels wrong to make attempts at returning to their former tasks. 

 

Lena puts the tub of coffee down on the counter in an overly controlled manner, feeling a disconnect between how fast her thoughts are running through her head and how slowly the time around her is moving. No matter what she does, it all seems to come back to the two people only a room away. 

 

"It's odd to think they were dead this morning." She says, and it's less of a statement and more of a thought she let slip. Jesse lets out a huff of air in response, crouched down to her right to stack cans in the lower cabinet. Bridgette bites a lip– having no personal connection to any of this, she must feel an outcast. Lena makes a note to apologize later, but she can't really summon much courtesy or polite conversation at the moment. Her train of thought feels like it's stuck in a loop. 

 

"We gave eulogies at their funerals, and now they're havin' a chat next door." Torbjorn frowns. They all know it's not quite that simple, but she notices that nobody tries to argue. Deep down, they all agree. 

 

Jesse's brows are pinched together, and it really strikes her how much older he is. He looks like Reyes when he scowls. It shouldn't be unsettling, but there's something in it that makes a shiver run down her neck, like someone's been dancing on her grave. Or someone else's. "Did they never plan on stoppin' by and lettin' us know? 'Hey, by the way, not as dead as everyone thought! Just so y'all know!'"

 

They'd all fallen to pieces after everything. It wasn't just Overwatch coming to pieces; they'd lost friends– _family_ – to the fallout. These were people with clean military graves that they'd stood over, trying desperately to hold back tears. She'd given speeches with empty words on her tongue to waves upon waves of cameras hungry for comments. And it had all been...

 

Everything they'd said and thought and fought to protect, these legacies that they've been holding close, they're not quite the same anymore. There's nothing in the world that feels like this, and she'd know. 

 

She feels herself getting angry, and forces herself to breathe out. It's not quite so simple as them up and leaving. They had reasons, damn _good_ reasons. She didn't need to have it explained to her to figure it out. But all the same, no one had ever said a thing. Not a bloody thing. 

 

The door slides open and she jumps, startled. Winston and Reinhardt meander in with the last of the groceries, breaking the air of gloom pervading the kitchen. They all take the distraction gratefully, but she knows better than to hope that they've all moved on. Out of the corner of her eye she catches quiet frowns and pinched brows, listens to sentences trail off and switch tracks abruptly. They're all putting on their best fronts, but she doesn't believe for a second that anyone's fooled. 

 

-

 

 

The room is cold and sterile, enough so that the smell of it stings. Ana knows she should be tired, but she finds it difficult to justify rest with so many explanations and apologies on the tip of her tongue. Of all the things she'd thought she'd need to apologize for, this hadn't been near the top of the list. And yet...

 

Reinhardt, the dear he is, had only been glad. He'd hugged her like she'd– well, come back from the dead. But she wasn't dense enough to imagine that meant he wasn't hurt. She owed him a goodbye, and she hadn't even given him that. 

 

She sighs. She's got a lot of amends to make. 

 

Ziegler moves around, organizing things and tapping on screens, but Ana can't look at anything other than Jack. The biotic field set up around the cot creates a sort of reverie from the stark white light of the med bay, and the bandages no longer display splotches of red, to her relief. She hadn't trusted her tools at hand, so she'd never made any attempts at sterilization, or even try to remove any debris that could have gotten in the wound. The main concern had been keeping the blood flow to a minimum, but she feels somewhat abashed at her rushed job. 

 

She'd offered to help Angela work, and only succeeded in doing so to a minimal degree. Her own fatigue and injuries kept her from being steady, and the sweat and blood meant she wasn't acceptably sterile to work with bandages or stitches, so she had really only been good for handling the biotic equipment. They had no illusions that he'd die of an infection of all things between his alterations and the healing fields, but the risk was there. She also admits in retrospect, the doctor had probably been urging her to handle the easier work as a method of coercing her into resting. 

 

"It will be better for everyone if you get some rest." Angela's voice cuts into her thoughts. She's down to sweats now, rumpled and wearing an expression that makes Ana think she's being analyzed. Yet there is a softness to it; for all the demands and the disappointed frowns. It's easy to tell it comes from a place of concern. 

 

When had Ziegler started turning her own medicine back on her? 

 

Ana smiles, tired and unexpectedly fond. The blond looks briefly taken aback, but responds in kind. "Got it, doc."

 

"I have left extra clothes on the table in the next room if you want them." Angela says as she turns, headed for the door. "Athena is here if you need anything." She thumbs the light panel, and the room dims, all but the biotic field around Jack. Briefly she thinks it's quite pretty, and then she decides she's going to take a cot in the other room to avoid the light. 

 

Shedding her armor is the best thing she's felt all day, and she stretches her arms above her head, reveling in the freedom of movement. Down to her undershirt and pants, she pads across the darkened room and past the divider that splits it in two. Stacked on the table exactly as promised are a set of Overwatch-issue sweats and a clean towel. 

 

Grimy and weary, but finally safe, she heads to the showers, intent on washing away the day's hurts and regrets. In the back of her mind she knows it'll never truly work, but after all this time it never stops her from trying. 

 

-

 

A woman frowns in thought, staring down at the documents before her. Her eyes flick from word to word, image to image. A video of Lena Oxton laughs silently. An ability overview sits next to her old air force file, topped with a picture of her smiling for her profile, young and eager to prove herself. The woman swipes a finger across the screen, paging through the proposal. A psychological report on the Widowmaker. Footage from the Overwatch museum. Supply requirements for the plan being proposed. 

 

"Will she rebel when pushed?" She asks calmly. 

 

The doctor adjusts the thin glasses perched on her regal nose. "She won't." 

 

"And if she does?" 

 

"She's rebelled before. We will simply need to reprogram. Besides, we have other safety precautions." 

 

The woman nods, satisfied. She turns from the screen, eyes glimmering. 

 

"Good."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm looking forward to picking up the pace in future chapters, but for now, I hope you guys enjoy!


	4. Chapter 4

 

Breakfast is a somber affair of people shuffling in and out of the kitchen, muttering requests to pass the sugar please or excuse me I need a mug. Mei is chipper as usual, but she still seems a little put off by the developments of the last evening. She ends up taking her tea and heading to Winston's work area. Lena actually doesn't know if he's even awake yet, but it's fairly late morning by now, so she reasons he'd probably be up and at it. 

 

Lena and Jesse share some sarcastic remarks over a pot of coffee, wondering about Jack and Ana as lightheartedly as they can manage. It's pained, and they both know it, but there's not much to be done. She switches the topic to food, and he looks momentarily grateful before launching back into a defense of southern pastries. 

 

She vehemently disagrees with him even when it approaches the nonsensical, and before she realizes what's happening her hand shoots out to catch the moon pie he's thrown her way from the cabinet. 

 

She stares down at the plastic in bewilderment for a second, having almost forgotten they'd bought the box of them yesterday. She says as much, and he scoffs. Apparently it's insulting and downright disrespectful. 

 

"'Respect your elders' an' all that?" The plastic squeaks as she tears it open. The thin coat of chocolate coating the cake is already cracked. 

 

"Damn right, string bean. Hey wai– did you just call me old?" 

 

"This doesn't strike me as a terribly nutritious breakfast." She says, avoiding the question. 

 

"I won't tell Angela if you don't." Jesse winks, reaching over to break off a side. The cake crumbles instantly, and the marshmallow innards resist breaking off momentarily before giving up. She takes a piece for herself, trying to avoid a mess but knowing it's inevitable. 

 

"It's just an inconvenient cake." She says, playing up her indifference but still licking the residue off her fingers. 

 

"I swear Oxton, one day you're gonna bring me to tears." 

 

She laughs, and it feels like a breath of fresh air.

 

-

 

When she sees Angela later that day the doctor looks deep in thought, but she brightens up when Lena greets her, so she figures whatever is going on with Morrison must be manageable to see her away from the med bay. She considers popping by to satisfy curiosity, but never does. She tells herself the avoidance is out of courtesy and not fear. 

 

Instead she ends up meandering around the base. She'd have liked to badger Winston, but when she stopped by to check in on him he looked to be sucked into a conversation with Bridgette and Torbjorn about drone security. The engineer-speak eluded her for the most part, so the day was really only left up to whatever she determined was a good use of it, at least until directed otherwise. It's an odd feeling to have free reign over her day, and one she soon discovers isn't entirely welcome. The whole experience is soured by apprehension and worry, and perhaps hints of anger. A jog doesn't help ease any of these feelings, but it does help her feel how excruciatingly slowly the hours seem to be ticking by. There are birds fluttering around the lighthouses she can see, and every once in a while one of the barges lets out a guttural whine in warning to other passing ships. 

 

She hadn't said anything about it yesterday, but the dream sticks with her, of Seventy-Six engulfed in shadow, blood dripping from his visor. The line of light cut out against the shadow sharply, a bloody vigil against the dark that she knew would fail. It was a stupid anxiety dream; a strange mix of past adversaries and people she caught glimpses of on the news. That's what she'd told herself, at least. And then, of course, the next afternoon Jack Morrison himself wandered in, covered in blood and half dead on his feet. "Dream." She mutters sardonically. 

 

She spots the car they came here in parked outside a warehouse, innocent enough if it weren't for the missing license plates. The tunnel in the side of the cliff they came through looms in shadow, even behind the fence and the patches of wild greenery. The road coming out of it is worn and cracked along the sides where pebbles of it create a buffer between concrete and dirt. The lights lining it seem weak from here against the brilliant glare of sunlight, and she wonders not for the first time how Jesse, or Amari for that matter, managed to wander through it hindered with injuries such as they were. 

 

It's immediately after that she spots the figure hunched into the car door, rummaging around in the back seat. 

 

She approaches the former captain hesitantly, raking her hair away from her eyes with sweaty fingers. She makes no attempts to be quiet, as if approaching a scared animal. When Amari turns she's reminded exactly how little that is the case. 

 

The woman is in sweats with her white hair held up in a braid. Nothing of her armor she was wearing yesterday remain except her shoes and her eyepatch. The blue fabric covers a good quarter of her face, and Lena thinks, perhaps a little rudely, that it was a good thing the shot hadn't landed in the tattooed eye. 

 

"Need help?" She asks. 

 

"Not particularly," the woman starts, turning back to the car. She hums when she finally finds what she's looking for: a faceplate with a red visor that had fallen under the seat. Lena blinks at it, shaking off the discomfort. 

 

The car door slams shut, and in Ana's other hand something glitters brightly for a second before she tucks it away into her left pocket. Lena could have sworn it was a bracelet, but there's no way to be sure without asking, which she isn't inclined towards. She opens her mouth, but nothing she wants to say manages to come out. Instead she starts shakily: "I'm glad you're..." 

 

"Not dead?" Ana asks, remaining eyebrow raised. 

 

"Yeah," she lets out a wheezy half–laugh that's barely more than something to fill the empty space. "Not dead." 

 

The air of the exchange is strained, and she ends up carrying a rifle and some empty biotic cartridges back to base, exchanging idle talk that ends up meaning nothing at all once she goes back over it in her head later. She knows that when Ana actually explains everything it'll be to everyone so she won't have to repeat it, but the not knowing is getting to her. She remembers the handful of missions she served under Amari for; the rooms were deathly quiet, and the captain's voice rang out clear and uninterrupted. She was the boss, and anybody who listened to her speak knew it. 

 

Lena resigns herself to helping Bridgette and reviewing the available files on Talon for the remainder of the day after departing from Ana at the med bay, and sundown finds her reading mission reports from Captain Amari's "final" mission. 

 

  
_"They say she took out Amari."_ She hears Winston's voice from those months ago. She stares at a blurry picture of the famed Widowmaker, still able to hear that final shot ring out over the stony courtyard in King's Row. 

 

Lena's lip is raw from her worrying when her comm beeps from her bunk across the room. She blinks at it for a moment, bewildered from having been interrupted from her little world of news reports and corrupted camera feeds. She gets up numbly, feeling strangely disconnected from herself, before Athena's smooth, steady voice brings her back. 

 

She catches the latter half of what seems to be a group announcement. "–has requested a gathering in the main workshop. She says she has answers." 

 

Lena doesn't need to ask for any further clarification. 

 

-

 

It's quiet. Everything is quiet with him gone. 

 

Widow tells herself it isn't unsettling. She's glad for the rest; Reyes was loud and obtrusive, not to mention insubordinate. His absence will make for better productivity.

 

Lesser ranked Talon personnel rarely speak to her unless to relay an order, a habit for which she is glad. She doesn't need to be wasting time or effort on small talk with people who will probably be dead by the year's end, if not the month. 

 

Reaper has been away for almost ten days now. He was sent to intimidate some small weapons dealer who was getting unruly, but the task was to last a day at most. If he was on a classified mission she would know, whether due to reports or simply watching the behavior of her superiors in meetings. Instead they fidget and frown at the mention of him, requesting activity reports and comm trackers. They have no idea where he is. 

 

The silence as she walks away from the training grounds is palpable and verging on disconcerting. Of course, it doesn't quite get there. He can do whatever he wants; its inconsequential. She has a job to do regardless of whether he deigns to show up. The new assignment will be upon them in a month's time, and she will succeed with or without him. 

 

Her boots scuff the metal floor as she turns the corner leading into the residential hallway. She won't need to stop walking until she reaches the seventh door to the left. 

 

One. Two. 

 

"Together." She remembers with a small frown. The voice is his low grate this time. She can still hear the moth hitting the concrete. 

 

Three. Four. 

 

Her arm gripping his, she had strained to hold him and herself up on that grappling line, but she hadn't dropped him. She remembers being surprised that his skin was warm to the touch. He had mumbled something resembling a thanks the next day, and she'd ignored it. 

 

Five. 

 

"Lacroix." The name didn't sound right on his tongue, and they both knew it. It was an accusation, but not one meant to incriminate. The name was something sour and rotting, but she hadn't corrected him. She should have.

 

Six. 

 

To check, she tells herself. No harm has ever come from caution. The door to his room slides open with a _chink._  

 

The room is dark, but the dim light from the hallway is enough. There's not much to see: and old hoodie tossed over the back of a chair, a torn coat crumpled in the corner, the gleam of his weaponry sitting cleanly arranged on the table. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust enough to make out the form strewn limply across the bed. 

 

It shifts at the new disturbance, and she spies blood on the previously white sheets. Injured. 

 

Reyes makes a disgruntled but otherwise exhausted sound. He probably stalked in at some point and collapsed. She feels a mild irritation at not having been informed. Though, judging from the blood, nobody else had either. Certainly not med bay. 

 

She tells herself this isn't a relief, and it is mostly true. She breathes no quiet sigh of relief, offers no apologies or greetings. She can smell the scent of blood and ash that chases him everywhere he goes, and motes of dust drift through the intruding beam of dim light.

 

He will seek aid if he needs it, Widow decides. She turns back to the hall, stoic as ever. 

 

"Welcome back." She says. It is wry and cold, and if there is another meaning hiding between the words, she ignores it.

 

-

 

Lena listens to everything, but all that seems to really catch in her head is the name _Amelie Lacriox_. She wants desperately to pry, but Ana looks pained as she says the name, so she holds her tongue. The former captain tries her best to calmly recount the events of her departure and what she knows about the downfall of the organization, but it's easy to tell when she's not quite able to stay impartial, between her scrunched brow and the way she leaps over subject matters she doesn't quite know how to explain. There's so much and somehow also not much at all, but what hurts is the _why._  

 

She shouldn't feel betrayed by it; she's no stranger to running from her problems, but the hurt lingers all the same. Jack and Ana both had been there to give her purpose when everything she had thought her life was going to be crashed and burned, something she won't forget for as long as she lives. They'd let her be more than a science experiment gone wrong, and they gave her a chance, a real chance, to make something more for herself. Winston had been her lifeline, and Overwatch had been her shore. 

 

All she can think about is how empty the graves are. She gave speeches over them, she remembers dully. She'd cried then, really cried, and leaned into Winston for support. She does the same now, but there aren't any tears this time. Only a strange ache that she knows all of them can feel.

 

Amari frowns as she begins her tale of the Reaper, talking grimly of Talon and explosions, and even her version of the story feels cobbled together. She explains the scraps of what Jack has told her of the Swiss HQ incident, but it's vague and sheds no real light on the events. Angela averts her eyes, but nobody makes comment of this. 

 

Gabriel. 

 

She'd worked with him on some missions, had to sit through hearings and press conferences with him, but she'd never known him personally. There's a shock, one that feels reminiscent of the one she felt when the Blackwatch files were brought to public attention. Extortion, blackmail, torture. This was stuff that she never would have believed Overwatch, even a subsection thereof, would have ever taken part in. Except they had. 

 

There's a difference between getting rough on a mission when there's no other choice, and deliberately and knowingly stooping to that. It wasn't what they were supposed to stand for. 

 

Except they did. All the way to the end. 

 

Any other day she would think of all the good they did despite the distasteful practices. She would think of how many crime rings were broken down and how many people they saved in the process. Now it's dulled. Deadlock is still active according to Jesse, and Talon has made it very clear they're still in the picture. It feels like all of the bad things they did for the sake of good ended up doing nothing at all. 

 

And now the Reaper– a killer and a monster who assaulted this very base and is working with one of the most notorious terrorist groups in recent history, was a former commander. Not just a commander, but Gabriel Reyes. 

 

"I'm not sure how much is left of him. Something... He isn't the Gabriel I knew." Ana grinds out, her eyes never leaving the floor. Seeing the captain so shaken is new and unsettling, if the information she'd just divulged wasn't already. 

 

Lena doesn't get the chance to feel much beyond discomfort and shock before Jesse gets up and leaves, head low and shoulders hunched. She can't tell if he's angry or confused, or both, but she knows enough to not follow and let him be for a while. If anyone has the right to be upset, it's him. 

 

Lacriox. Reyes. Lena has to wonder exactly how many pieces of the broken Overwatch Talon managed to pick up. She buries her face in Winston's shoulder and wonders when this heroic cause had turned so gray. 

 

-

 

Lena wakes up an hour and a half before her alarm. She looks gaunt under the white bathroom lighting, and she realizes distantly that she never took off the accelerator harness before sleeping. 

 

Her fingers drum on the edge of it as she stares at the mirror, sounding out the name as though it will explain to her everything that's been running through her head since the recall. It doesn't, but she says it anyway. 

 

"Amelie Lacroix."

 

-

 

The next day manages to thaw the mood of the place considerably as they all fall back into rhythm, and Lena is more than grateful for it. Winston does a check-in on the accelerator, which she complains about. It's not as though they've been on a mission; he might as well wait until it's actually damaged, but it has been a month since the last one, and he never knows when to stop trying to improve. It's saved her life on many an occasion, so she is cooperative for the most part (though a little teasing never hurt anyone). 

 

All of lunch is taken up with a press call, which have been becoming more frequent to her chagrin. Angela is better at handling them, but she's busier lately, so the friendliest face they can find is Lena's. She concedes only to keep the job from falling to Torbjorn or Reinhardt. Reinhardt has never been a cautious speaker, and Torbie is... she feels like crass is an understatement. She makes a short speech about hope and protecting the world when no one else is willing to, which sounds to her like the same one she's given at least three times in the past two months, but the interviewer accepts it. 

 

She leaves the call in a dampened mood, but thankful she's not the one who handles the legal proceedings. They're in a fragile spot right now, but it seems like much of the public is on their side after the interviews with the boys they saved in Numbani were released. It's still not a spot she likes, considering their case is being poked at by UN officials who could just say their proceedings are still illegal and arrest them. According to Winston he's cautiously confident that won't actually happen, so she tries to share in that optimism. 

 

Lunch itself is late and eaten over a text conversation with Genji, who expresses excitement at the prospect of introducing the team to one "Zenyatta". The way he talks about the omnic makes her agree, but he seems to dance around the subject when she asks what he's been up to. She'll have to grill him when he finally gets to base. 

 

The garden seems to be coming along when she stops by, though Mei and Torbie seem too engrossed in their conversation to pay her much mind. Something about temperature modulation. She keeps an eye out for Jesse, but she doesn't find him until that afternoon in the practice range. 

 

Athena announces her entry coolly, and it strikes Lena how quiet it is in here. When Athena had told her he was in here, she'd at least hoped to find him doing something instead of wallowing in the news by himself. The room smells of cigarette smoke, and judging from the state of the targets, he's been at it for a while. 

 

"Jesse?" She asks, even though she can see him on the other side of the range. Her voice echoes loudly in the large room, but she tries not to pay it much mind. 

 

"Hey, Oxton." He sounds defeated and ragged, and as she approaches it becomes painfully apparent how little he slept last night. His hair is messy and unclean, and his gray shirt is rumpled. It's the same one he wore the previous day. 

 

She bites her lip, unsure. There's no easy way to start a conversation like this, so she barbells ahead without thinking over her options too much. If she sits around waiting for the right words to come to her, it'll be far too late to say them. 

 

"Holding up?" She asks, seating herself on the bench next to him. There's an old whiteboard on the wall that they'd cleaned off a while ago, but the old marks have stained the board to the point that they can't erase it. If she squints she can make out the beginning of what looks like the name "Sparks". 

 

He lets out a dry chuckle that has no humor to it and runs a hand through his hair. "I'll let you be the judge of that. Not sure I'm qualified at the moment." 

 

She thinks he looks like a right mess, but she's not about to just blurt that out. He's got on jeans and an old tee-shirt that probably need to be washed, his boots that are in want of a dusting off, and a half-assed tired smile that does more to highlight his exhaustion than convince her he's fine. 

 

"After yesterday I don't think you're required to be," She starts, "but you should probably take a shower at some point before we start suffocating." 

 

"I get it, I get it." He waves a hand to swat at her, which she dodges. 

 

"Really though. You okay?" 

 

"Nah," he says as he runs a hand down his face. "But you knew that." 

 

"Care to elaborate?" 

 

"There was a reason I left." His sigh is weary. "The job was always cleaning up after the stuff Overwatch couldn't handle, or couldn't be seen handling. Gabe... He wasn't always actin' like Gabe. Dude was an intimidating bastard, but he had a heart somewhere in there, 'n we all knew it. 

 

"Starts talkin' about Overwatch more, I dunno. These rants would happen outta nowhere. He was frustrated 'bout being swept under the rug, but he wasn't ever _this_ peeved. Then he just..." 

 

Jesse swallows, scratches his neck. 

 

"We had some fights. I loved him, I really did, but the jobs kept gettin' riskier, the stuff we did kept gettin' more questionable. There were so many excuses, but eventually I just couldn't see it as good anymore. Maybe I spent too much time around you Overwatch folks, 'dunno." 

 

"But even with all that, he was never... When I knew him he wasn't _that_. He wouldn't have went over to Talon, not after what happened to the Lacroixs. We knew firsthand the kinda group it was. We did some bad shit, but not _that_. I wanna believe they did somethin', or maybe it ain't him after all, but that'd be too good to be true considering my luck." 

 

He looks utterly beaten, and it reminds her of the last time she saw him before Overwatch collapsed. It was some defense op, and it was clear he'd had some disagreement with Reyes, because every order was followed with a huff and a scowl. At the end he just looked worn, unlike the tiredness of fighting and sweating and having orders barked at you, but the tiredness of realizing that no matter what you do or say, nothing is going to change. 

 

Not two months later, they said Agent McCree up and left, they said he'll probably be dead by the end of the year, with that deadlock history. Lena had been silently rooting for him then, but she'd have been given an earful if she'd voiced it.

 

It's different though. There's no superior she needs to please, and the one time she doesn't know what to say is the one time she's finally able to say it. Funny how that always seems to work out. 

 

She struggles to find a response, but eventually replies, "Whether any of it turns out to be true, or if there's some hidden scheme goin' on, there's nothin to be got outta wallowin' in it, right?" She elbows him playfully to punctuate the question, and she thinks she catches the barest hint of a smile. 

 

"Well if it's some monster walking around in his skin, I owe it to him to put it outta its misery, and if it is him, he ain't my brother." McCree nods decisively. He looks considerably less depressing than he did when she first came down here, so Lena considers the pep-talk a victory. 

 

"And we'll all be there for ya, no matter what. We're a team again, so if you start thinkin' you can go all lone wolf on us you've got another thing coming." The mock-threat seems to have the desired effect, because this time the chuckle is genuine. 

 

"Get yourself cleaned up before dinner. Torbie is cookin'." She says in departure, making her way back out of the range. 

 

"Aye aye, captain." His response follows her, sounding more like himself. 

 

-

 

"This is a good idea, right?" Lena asks the room.

 

Winston looks up from where he's poking around inside a computer. It looks bulky and reminiscent of technology back at the turn of the century, before either of them were even born. But Athena is also bulky, and therefore the hardware to manage her and the base systems both needs to be up to par, so she supposes the bulkiness can be excused. 

 

"What's that supposed to mean?" Winston's voice is jokingly offended as he turns back to his work pulling wires out of some things and connecting them to others. If she cared to investigate she might be able to make sense of it, but it seems like a lot of work to cross the room, and she's finally found a comfortable position in one of the tires he has scattered about. 

 

"I dunno. I guess..." Her head tilts to the side more out of tiredness than deep thought. "I forgot how many enemies we made in the old days when we still had the resources to fight back." 

 

"And now we seem a little out-gunned. Been poking around the Talon files, huh?" 

 

She blows a raspberry in his direction, but he doesn't look up. "Maybe." 

 

"You'd probably do best not to worry about it. The base is more than defensible, and nobody has been brave enough to make a ruckus about legal action yet." 

 

"Yeah, yeah. We're here for a reason, all that." She waves a hand dismissively. "It's been months now, and fixin' up the base is important, and so is training, but damn if I'm not gettin' a tad antsy." 

 

"Careful what you wish for." Winston says, and she can't help but think he sounds like Amari. 

 

-

 

Lena bites her lip, wishing the ache in her chest wasn't there as she listens to Winston explain Athena's findings to everyone in the meeting room, which is actually just a cleared work table with metal chairs dragged up around it, because walking across base to the actual conference room is silly at this point.

 

"How do we know? If we start warning people we could end up kicking up a panic for nothin'." Jesse asks. 

 

Winston adjusts his glasses and raises a finger for each point made, "Talon has a history of very public and very televised assassinations, and the Synesthesia tour promotes a lot of the ideas their previous targets have campaigned for." He doesn't outright say _Mondata,_ but he might as well have. "We still don't know the whereabouts of the Widowmaker; nobody's spotted her or any other notable Talon operatives for weeks." Ana frowns at this, whether in concern or anger Lena can't tell. 

 

"And the upcoming show will be one of the biggest in the entire tour, not to mention one of the most televised celebrity events in this year thus far. I can't think of anything that sounds more perfect for a Talon strike. The entire situation is calling their name." 

 

"Fuckers do love attention." Jesse concedes, nodding. "If we're concerned, we at least gotta tell the man himself. Let him know to be on guard, post more security. Somethin'."

 

Angela's brows are pinched in thought. "They should have preparations regardless, but we are some of the only people to successfully fight Talon and live to tell of it. It is in everyone's best interest, as well as our responsibility, to at least offer information." 

 

McCree mentioned Blackwatch tactics a few days back when they'd need brushing up on Talon protocols, but now he stays silent, probably worrying to some degree about the same thing Lena is. They aren't the Overwatch that went up against Talon in the old days. They don't have a Gerard Lacroix to tell them what to do anymore, and even if they did, they don't have the numbers to do much more than hope. 

 

The conversation moves to contact details, but all Lena can think about is the crowd around Mondata as his body fell. She wouldn't know what to do with herself if she let the same thing happen again. 

 

-

 

The call starts with the normal pleasantries, but all of them are paired with an undercurrent of worry. The initial excitement over meeting a celebrity she follows faded a few months ago when they first started correspondence, but it's always nice to visually interact with Lúcio instead of texting over the course of hours due to time zone complications. 

 

They'd all just expected to up security, but Lena remembers the way the guards around Mondata's speech had been picked off by Widow's attack, and that had just been one operative. If the trend of continuing to work with the Reaper continues, she reasons hired guns, no matter how many, might not cut it. She says as much, and a murmur about protocols and security companies rises briefly, only to be interrupted. 

 

"Why don't you just come to the show?" The musician pipes up. "You guys held off Talon at the Overwatch Museum, and the guys on that Houston train said Eastwood over there held off a whole infestation of grunts on a train without breakin' a sweat. If that's even half true, we're set!" 

 

"I'm uh, not strictly sure how legal that is at the moment." Jesse scratches his head. "Which off the record I'd be fine with, but it ain't just my name we'd be dragging through the mud." 

 

"Well if anything happens it'll be in self-defense, right? I'll just say I'm inviting you cause you're inspirations outside of Overwatch stuff. You'll just be guests, except a little bit more badass."

 

"Whaddaya think?" The musician asks into the contemplative silence, leaning back in his chair. He looks terribly pleased with his proposition, and Lena can't exactly disagree with him. 

 

Everyone crowded around the screen looks over to Winston for judgement, who looks taken off guard by the sudden attention. "I–" he stammers for a moment before collecting his thoughts, "It uh, actually sounds like a good idea." He says, adjusting his glasses and looking back to the video feed. 

 

"We're not body guards." Torbjorn crosses his arms. She's always looked up to the engineer, but water is wet, the sun is bright, and Torbjorn is ever the critic. 

 

"Think of it as publicity." Lúcio waves a hand. "I'll cover the clothes and hotel and stuff, so you don't gotta worry about any of that. I'll be getting a lot of coverage in New York– even more than usual, so this is the perfect time to draw support, yeah? Win-win." He responds with a grin that Lena realizes she's sharing. Damn him. It's infectious. 

 

Winston shrugs and looks at Lena, who cheers at the idea of getting off-base. Not just that– but getting off base to attend one of the biggest concerts in the Synesthesia world tour. She'd never expected a jackpot like this when she woke up this morning. 

 

"Well I think Lena's just volunteered." Bridgette laughs.

 

"Damn right I have!" She grins, and determinedly ignores the part of her that keeps thinking of her failure at the peace rally. This won't be like that. She'll make damn sure it won't. 

 

-

 

She knows they won't leave for another week, but Lena takes an inventory of anything she would need to bring regardless. Food will be provided, and so will show-and-interview-appropriate clothing, so eliminating both of those her backpack ends up looking rather empty. Looking over her sparse wardrobe and small spread of hair care items and crumpled band-aid boxes, it strikes her suddenly how few personal things she actually owns. 

 

Jacket, notebooks, tablet. Earrings, socks, an old pen with a cap patterned with cartoon blueberries. Her notebooks are one of the only things that are actually and entirely hers. There are pictures taped to the pages and short descriptions of memories and thoughts she'd deemed too important to forget, thoughts of emptiness and memories of people and times she's never seen. She's gone through four books now, and Winston says she should probably scan them at some point so as not to lose them. She knows he's probably right, but for one reason or another she's just never gotten around to it. 

 

At first she only had them because foreign tech could sometimes get destroyed by the chronal accelerator room she'd been cooped up in for those first months after the crash, but eventually it just became a habit. Lena found that she had several antiquated habits that she'd never had before the slipstream, but after all these years she's grown accustomed to not knowing everything about herself anymore. At some point one has to accept exactly how much of their life is lost to them.

 

She thumbs through the pages of her first notebook, scribbles of headlines that didn't make sense to her and short descriptions of people she forgot the names of. Two pages are dedicated to describing a great house surrounded by tall grass and all the people living in it. There's notes about an old kitchen and how certain people liked their breakfast, thoughts on people she couldn't remember anymore if she tried. Half a page is dedicated to an old cat she used to slip leftovers to, but the details of it all evade her now. Trying to catch those old thoughts is like trying to catch sand in her fingers; it all just slips away. 

 

She tucks the notebooks back into their corner of the trunk and clicks the thing shut. When she unlocks her tablet she's met with a headline from the London News: _Mondata Statue to be Erected in King's Row, Meets Protest From Anti-Assimilation Groups._ She wrinkles her nose at the mention of the protests, and ends up staring at an image of Mondata plated in brilliant gold. He looks as serene as ever, and it makes something in her gut twist. 

 

Tossing the screen down into the sheets on her bunk, Lena turns, unwilling to let herself wallow in nervousness or second guess decisions she can't change. The door shuts loudly behind her as she goes to find Mei, or just about anyone, really. As she stalks away from the darkened room she decides she can't stand another bloody minute stewing in her own head. 

 

-

 

Ana actually attends a meal three days before the assigned team's departure. She falls back into an easy rapport with Torbjorn and Reinhardt effortlessly, and the light conversation is refreshing. Oxton jokes in her direction several times, but the girl was never good at hiding her thoughts from people who knew her, and it's plain in the hesitance of her voice that she has something to ask. 

 

To her credit, the pilot makes it through the entire meal without mentioning anything, but Ana isn't fooled by much. She gives a window for Lena to catch her as she collects a plate for Jack, who keeps insisting he's perfectly capable of walking around on his own. He still complies to Angela's wishes for him to stay put for at least until the end of the week though, perhaps out of respect for authority, or maybe just an old fondness for the doctor. She'd always been one of his favorites. 

 

She supposes it's good that he still has that: a student that never left him, never betrayed him, still cares what happens to him after all this time. They'd all had favorites; it was hard not to, especially when they all knew they wouldn't be able to keep going forever. It's instinctual to want someone capable to take up your place when you can't anymore, and she sure as hell wasn't going to let Fareeha endanger herself out of some twisted aspiration to be like mom, but it seems to have bitten most of them in the ass. In fairness to McCree, he'd actually seen the writing on the wall that the rest of them had missed. It was a pity she'd had to take a bullet to the head to finally see the same thing. 

 

It's as she's making her way to medbay that Oxton finally catches her, jogging after her down the hall. "Cap- uh, Amari!" 

 

Ana stops to let her catch up even though they both know the pilot could outrun her any day, even without the accelerator. "Yes?" She asks, watching Lena as she slows to match her resumed pace. 

 

"I um, had some questions. About some Talon agents. One specific one, actually." She looks overly cautious, like she's afraid to have said something wrong. 

 

"You want to know more about the Widowmaker."

 

Lena nods. Ana closes her eyes briefly, collecting herself before taking a deep breath. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im back, baby! chapter 5 will be out in about a week, but after that i cant make promises. i hope you guys enjoyed, and i hope you stick around! thanks for reading <3


	5. Chapter 5

"Ana."    
  
She turns, reluctant. The medbay is cold, and her slipper squeaks as she rotates on the tile. She knows they need to talk; not just about food or gear or 'How are your life threatening wounds today?' but actually, genuinely, talk.    
  
That doesn't mean she has to be overjoyed about it. She swears, sometimes she thinks she's getting too old for all of these emotions running around in her own head. She should have gotten over being nervous years ago.   
  
"Jack."    
  
He can talk now, which she can't decide is for the better or worse. She grudgingly admits to caring about him, but damn, he sure can be a windbag sometimes.    
  
As it is, he looks, frankly, like shit. He's propped up on the cot, white hair mussed and in need of washing, the way it'll remain until he can make it to the showers without collapsing. His eyes are sunken and purple from exhaustion, though the man has plenty of time to sleep as he's stuck in he medbay for another day or two. She's jokingly offered to help his insomnia with a sleep dart or two, but in truth she knows that wouldn't be true sleep anyway– not that they both didn't consider it. She knows full well why sleep is evading him; why it's evading the both of them. (Aside from the gaping wounds, she amends as she glances at his bandages. Not red anymore. That's good.)   
  
He opens his mouth, but she can't just let all her guilt go unspoken, and if there is a time it's now. Especially after Ame– the Widowmaker, and Talon, have become much more relevant. She's wallowed in her guilt before, and it never got her anywhere but alone.    
  
"I'm sorry."    
  
He looks surprised. It's not like her to apologize, she knows that. She usually doesn't do anything to merit one to begin with, but this time she has, and she's not going to be cowardly enough to pretend she didn't. With a deep breath she continues, "I hesitated, and now you're here. Because of my inability to do what was necessary."    
  
She catches herself reaching for her eyepatch, and puts her hand down quickly. Bad habit.    
  
Jack looks like he used to before conferences: eyebrows pinched as he gathers his words to the best of his ability and brooding over them all like some witch concocting a brew. Ultimately words always prove to be fickle, and they very painfully failed him on many an occasion, but still he sits and contemplates like there's something perfect he can say to fix everything. She supposes caution never hurt anyone. It would be nice if some special phase could put everything back into place.    
  
"We kinda fucked up, didn't we?"    
  
There's a silent beat before she bursts into laughter, so taken aback by the bluntness. Jack smiles wryly; it probably still hurts him to laugh.    
  
"If you want me to berate you or forgive you or anything, it's not really my place." He sighs after a moment and looks down at his hands instead of her. They've both become lax at schooling their expressions, and the pain is clear as day on his face. Too much time wearing masks, she supposes."I failed to shoot too. I guess neither of us were really as prepared as we wanted to believe."    
  
And she can still see it all over again, his eyes, his scars, his crumbling flesh. It's one thing to look upon a dead man, and another entirely to look upon one that should be dead. Imagining the agony that thing must be in, Ana finds herself wishing it was. It would be kinder.   
  
"As much as we've done, there's nothing that really prepares you for..." She takes a seat on the cot to his left, crossing one leg under the other. "It was different– having to look him in the eye." There was only one other time she'd had to aim to kill someone she cared for. Now she's failed twice, both times coming with high prices for her weakness. She has to stop her hand from going to her eye again.   
  
He just nods, and she just sits in thought as he eats at a turtle's pace. It hurts watching him like this, she realizes. They're both old, but she's never seen him act it before. The reminder of her age sends her mind straight to Fareeha, as most things do. She doesn't have forever, and it's more painfully apparent than ever that keeping away is an aimless and selfish pursuit.   
  
At least, she concedes to herself, Fareeha is still a fighter. She's strong and bright and so very brave, and if there's anything in this world Ana is proud of she is proudest of her. Of the many people she's failed in her life, at least Fareeha is not one of them.    
  
She thinks of Gabe, dead and dying and endlessly rotting. She thinks of Amelie, cold and vicious and irreparably lost.    
  
_ Death would be kinder.    
_   
It's sardonically that Ana realizes that of many things she's been called, she has never been outstandingly kind. The laugh that bubbles up in her throat is something harsh and mournful, and so very cold.    
  
-   
  
Widow wonders idly if this is what fear is like.    
  
The debrief is short and sweet, and the commander leaves them with a silent promise; the same one they've been repeating for years. If you are incapable of completing your task, you are a liability. Talon does not tolerate liabilities.    
  
Her quarters are dark and pristine, and she lays silent on the bunk, breaths slow and even. No sleep finds her, no matter how slowly she breathes or how little she moves. No, she thinks. This isn't fear. Something in the back of her mind knows fear like an old friend. It thinks of sweat and blood screaming for help, thinks of offering anything at all to win her freedom back. Thinks of the way her heart had stopped when she realized none of it would ever work.    
  
This is barely concern. This is apprehension perhaps, but not quite even that. This, she tells herself firmly, is nothing at all.    
  
And yet the ceiling is dark, and the vents hiss softly, and she remains awake.    
  
Failure is a bitter taste on Widowmaker's tongue, and an unwelcome one. She mulls over the Volskaya op, eyebrows drawn together in agitation. First the alarm trip, then the visor malfunction. They hadn't stopped working like that in half a decade, yet now they stop working the moment she needs to observe Sombra pursuing the target. It's convenient.    
  
She's been over the reports, and submitted her own. She's looked at the blueprints again and again, scanned the security details from the briefing. She's given her visor in for inspection, checked it herself (and everything else on her) for bugs. Nothing. Everything is untouched. If this was the hacker nuisance's handiwork, she left no trace.    
  
That doesn't make her think the girl is innocent. All of this is too convenient to be anything but some elaborate scheme, or perhaps just a rebel obsessed with defying authority. The hacker is good at what she does, but she is human. Only human.    
  
Amelie frowns. They're all only human. For all her experience, for all her programming, for all her training, Widow is only human.    
  
No, she thinks. She is a weapon.    
  
Weapons are meant to work. If one has a dull sword, one sharpens it. If one has a broken sword, one disposes of it. Amelie wonders how many failures it will take for them to finally begin to see her cracks.    
  
Widow sits up, unwilling to entertain these thoughts. Widow's kiss is a reassuring weight in her arms as she stalks down the darkened halls. She wasn't going to get any sleep anyway.    
  
-   
  
She skims the short list of names that have entered the training area recently, and she is relieved to find that everyone to enter, according to the log, has already left, with only one exception. The last name is only a code name instead of a full one, but she'd expected it, so she continues forward, punching in her numerical identification for the log. Widow doesn't care overmuch wether anyone knows she's here, mostly because there are only a handful of people on base brave enough to interact with her on a non-mandatory level, and she knows only two of them that would bother being in a training room at this hour.    
  
She's thankful that of the two, the only person she finds mercilessly shredding a dummy is Reaper. She doesn't know if she could tolerate Sombra right now, with Amelie running amok in her thoughts. He looks over at her for a moment, less in questioning and more in acknowledgement. She pulls up a chair to a metal table, sets Widow's kiss out before her robotically.    
  
The silence is a good one, she decides. Familiar. All that exists are the scrapes and punches as Reyes works away at a drone, the click of her gun as she disassembles it. Her hands are methodical and almost seem to work out of sync with her thoughts, like they don't need her. She has no mind games to play at this hour, no people to please and no hearts to stop. There is nothing but the grey room and the two of them, existing together but functioning apart.    
  
She doesn't need to do this herself. She could easily hand off her weapon to someone to have it taken care of; her expertise doesn't come from the rifle, it's from her, and Talon finds that immensely more valuable than the time of some agent to strip and clean it for her. She likes to believe it's because she wouldn't want anyone incompetent handling her equipment, but that's not quite all of it. She's prideful, but not enough so as to think everyone besides her is incapable of functioning properly.    
  
Perhaps it's some old, mangled sentiment. She'd always been taught to know herself, know her weapon, know her terrain. Never let anything around herself slip through the cracks, because one second is all it takes. One shot. One kill.    
  
She would know. She'd used those principles to kill the person who had taught her them.    
  
Amelie twinges in the same way she always does at the thought: from behind a labyrinth of walls and shields and locks. She should be used to it. She is used to it. Widow scrubs only a little to harshly at the barrel.    
  
It's just the failure, she thinks. The Volskaya infiltration went south, and now a failure on the part of someone else is affecting her. She did her job, and Sombra ultimately did not complete the objective. It was no fault of hers.   
  
Amari taught her how to hold a rifle. How to clean one, to shoot one. Amari taught her everything she needed to know to kill the woman where she stood. She learned from the absolute best. She killed the absolute best.    
  
And yet, Amelie thinks of the shot that wasn't, the one that breezed past Volskaya's pristine cheek as she was ushered to safety. _No matter what happens, you land the shot._ _   
_   
_ Talon does not tolerate liabilities.    
_   
"Lacroix." Reyes says. She looks up. For a moment it's just silent– her hands have stopped cold and his dummy lies to the side, forgotten. Her eyes flit across him calculatingly, picking out baggy sweats and sickly gray complexion and sharp, demanding eyes. He shifts his weight to his left side.    
  
"Spar?" He asks.   
  
She looks at her work on Widow's kiss: nearly complete, and not terribly necessary to begin with. Just something to do.    
  
Widow nods and makes her way towards the mat. She ignores the hint of a smile tugging at his scarred mouth.    
  
-   
  
Lena lets out her sixteenth sigh in the last hour and considers exactly how much she'd pay for the room to stretch her legs right now. She's gotten used to the taste of the recycled air, and the blueberry muffin she bought at the airport is two-thirds gone and sitting cold inside a paper bag tucked into her carry on.    
  
She would at least feel useful if she were the one piloting, but they couldn't have hoped to get clearance to land a combat ship of an unauthorized organization in one of the biggest cities in the world. Thus: here she sits in economy, squinting at the inky blackness outside her window. She tabs through her new messages for the fifth time in the last twenty minutes, and finds nothing, as has been the case for the last three intervals of this pattern. She would pester Mei or Reinhardt, but the former has her cyan blue headphones in and looks to be making an attempt at sleep, and the latter is verging on snoring, which she's seen Bridgette wake him up for a total of three times now. Lena would try to sleep herself, but it all seems to evade her as her thoughts churn incessantly.  She may close her eyes, but there are no dreams. It's fine though, she gave up on that hours ago.    
  
Amelie.    
  
Lena raps on the side of the accelerator with her knuckles, brows drawing together. Ana's voice was raspy and utterly exhausted, and her hand had been ghosting her missing eye, as if speaking that name was more than enough to cause her pain.    
_   
_ _"You could learn a thing or two from Frenchie over here."_ Lena can still hear the words just as clearly as she had eight years ago. The outline of Captain Amari's favorite protégé is still sharp in silhouette against the white light illuminating the targets. She hears the crack of gunfire bouncing around a gun range. There had been quite a few people using at the time, but now all she can remember is the echo of that rifle, the nod of Amari to her student in approval. The hole in the dummy, dead center.    
  
Her journal lies open on the tray. The newest page is just scribbled names and remembrances, a golden eye, a sickly grin.    
  
"She's gone now, Lena. She left us for Talon. Do not think you can reason with the monster she has become. With either of them." It hurt to listen to her, to hear how deeply she didn't want to believe her own words. Ana has always been a tough person to read, but this isn't something that can be sorted away. This is grief. This is fear.    
  
"I have made that mistake before." Ana had looked down at her tray of food for Jack, and Lena remembered the way he had been when they'd first arrived at the Watchpoint. She didn't ask what happened, but she knew they'd fought the Reaper.    
  
Now Lena just stares at the darkness just outside the glass, wondering about a thousand things and dreaming of none. She pulls out her headphones and doesn't think about a dead commander and and a missing agent.    
_   
_ _No one will come for you._ Lacriox's silken tones hiss softly in her ears, almost as if not to wake up her teammates. Like the words are only meant for her. _No one came for me._ _   
_   
Lena picks the loudest song she can find, and hits play.    
  
-   
  
Lúcio's grin is blinding as he greets them all with hugs and handshakes, which Reinhardt responds to enthusiastically. Where they're dressed for comfort, the musician exudes a sense of fashion with his hair put up and his hands tucked into the pockets of a pair of tangerine-colored pants. She could easily picture him on a magazine cover or an ad. He looks like an advertisement for spring: all greens and oranges and fruity colors, which Lena has to laugh at when she realizes she'd worn her orange leggings on the plane.    
  
"See? This is destiny right here!" He says as he greets her. She agrees with a laugh as they move towards baggage claim, raking a hand through her disheveled hair and feeling suddenly a lot more aware of how messy she looks.   
  
"Don't worry 'bout all that; we got all day 'till the show." He waves a hand dismissively in reassurance. "I'm just amped that you guys could make it! You guys are inspirations to me!"    
  
Reinhardt responds with a joking, "Well, of course!" Which Bridgette swats him on the shoulder for. Lena falls into step with Mei as the conversation turns towards the humorous, not wanting to leave the scientist out of the pleasantries. She looks anxious until the artist starts talking about how much of a fan he is of her blog; which she blushes at. Lena thinks the color makes her look like a bashful peach, or possibly a strawberry. Either way, it's utterly adorable.    
  
As they wait in baggage claim for their luggage it becomes painfully apparent how much Reinhardt towers over the rest of them. To Lúcio's credit, he waits a whole fifteen minutes before slipping in a height joke, which the crusader guffaws at. Lena, between adding chipper remarks to the conversation, is mostly occupied with taking in New York. The airport is a sight in and of itself, stories high with that looks like a city network of stores and restaurants that leads up at least ten stories. Security personnel regard the group briefly as they pass through a set of doors emblazoned with large red letters that read: NO RE-ENTRY.    
  
She knew beforehand that Lúcio had called a taxi to wait for them, but she's suddenly a million times more thankful for the gesture as they step out onto a curb swarming with tourists and businesspeople next to a road packed so tightly with yellow vehicles it seems to Lena they they might be trying to create their own lemony pathway on top of the original one. She could have sworn there was some song about yellow roads, but it evades her, as she cranes her neck to stare at the towering city around her.    
  
London is nothing to sneeze at, and Numbani is a sight to behold, but New York is something else to look at entirely. The buildings seem to never stop in their path upward, branching off like metal trees to connect with each other and make roadways and entire blocks suspended between skyscrapers. Lights and road signs and advertisements glare from every direction, all vibrantly screaming for attention almost as loudly as the actual noises of the city. Honks and beeps and screeches come from everywhere as they load their bags into the back of a van, and it all makes Lena think she's probably going to be grateful for the quiet hum of the Watchpoint when they get back.    
  
To the credit of the driver, an omnic with a cheerful looking faceplate who seems to be a fan of the word "dahlin'", the hovercar actually manages to get off the ground after they've all piled in. As tired as she is, she relishes in the opportunity to ogle at the city before they're on the clock this evening. The car putters along through the streets, sometimes taking upper streets to get through traffic jams, which Lena is informed is only possible for parties of four or more. The driver comments in a northern sort of drawl that it used to be three a few years back, but too many people were just sharing taxis, so they upped the limit to four plus a special pass noted by a sticker on the windshield.    
  
Interrupting the grays and blues of the city are spots of green perched on balconies and rooftops. They're living flotsam in a metal ocean, vibrant and defiant as they reach for the brilliant glaring sun that sends blinding glimmers off the monoliths of steel and glass. She's taken aback as they pass what can only be Central Park, an oasis of forest and lime contained behind a pristine fence. The whole section of the city near the park seems more clean; there are flowers hanging out of window boxes and people holding dog leashes instead of briefcases. If she squints she can see the edge of the barrier field stretching upwards to prohibit vehicles and drones from entering the Park's airspace.    
  
Reinhardt and Lúcio's voices drift in and out of her awareness, but she finds herself too fascinated with the sights of the city to pay mind to the small talk. They wouldn't talk about anything too terribly important in front of the driver anyway, so she doesn't feel too bad about missing the conversation. She's thrown against Mei's side as they take a sharp right, and it's not long after that that the vehicle screeches to a halt in front of a thin but towering building. She's found that a but unlike London, all the streets tend to conform to right angles, which leaves blocks of buildings that are split up as many ways as they can possibly be. This one is no different, as he hotel seems only a mere twenty feet wide but looks to be about fifteen levels tall, with an advertisement for a perfume she can't pronounce painted on one sided of the entryway and one for a popular soda painted on the other.   
  
Filing out of the van feels like exiting a clown car, which she giggles about as she watches Reinhardt follow Bridgette out, stretching his arms and voicing a want for a good nap. Lena can't help but think that sounds like an amazing idea.    
  
The place itself isn't actually that fancy; it's further on the edge of the city and much farther from any significant locations so she supposes it's a little less in-demand. That's probably a good thing, even if they have Lúcio with them. They can't save the world on generosity alone, and their budget is already thin. Loading their cases out of the trunk is an endeavor, and she finds herself impressed that the omnic actually managed to get them all in there to begin with. Pulling the cases out feels like reverse-Tetris, which is both satisfying and saddening considering how much effort to took to get them all packed together.    
  
Regardless, the driver speeds off with a fond goodbye after Lúcio forks over a generous tip, and they're left to sit in the limbo of check in for what is in reality about fifteen minutes, but what feels like years. The first thing she does when they reach the rooms is collapse on the clean bed in a manner not dissimilar to that of a rag doll. She finds the comparison apt as she lays bonelessly on the mattress, staring at a patch in the ceiling that looks to have been re-grouted in a color ever so slightly more beige than the rest of the off-white ceiling.    
  
Lena raps her knuckles on the accelerator as she laments her inability to sleep at a more convenient time. It's going to be a long day.    
  
-   
  
She clutches a coffee as they review plans and backup plans and backup-backup plans. The team is all crowded around a holo-projection of the stadium layout, with green dots representing show goers and yellow ones representing security. Marked in the middle is a red dot for the performer, which to Lena seems like a rather aggressive color for someone like Lúcio.    
  
They're going to do some mild interviewing that'll boil down to some inspirational quotes before the event, and they'll act like audience plant security for the extent of the show. They've been granted clearance for weapons so long as they're part of security staff, but they won't be cleared for open carry unless an actual situation arises. Bridgette is given a room to have the crusader suit at the ready, and she looks ready to start setup immediately after the location is decided. She handled customs with Athena to get all of their equipment, and Lena has seen firsthand how she commands authority in her workspaces. She imagines this will be no different, which will undoubtedly be an asset. Hell, she's seen the woman tell Torbie what to do, which is a feat in and of itself.    
  
Mei and Lena are assigned to two teams on adjacent sides of the stadium at what Athena determines are the most likely points for insertion of Talon agents if an attempt is made. Mei voices concern about being on her own, even despite the last few months of training. They only got her to agree to the trip because it would allow her to get new data from the New York climate research outpost, and her confidence in her combat abilities is still shaky at best. Lena gives her a reassuring smile and nudge, which the scientist seems to appreciate.    
  
At the tail end of the meeting before the actual setup, Lúcio leaves them all with a customized earpiece. It looks pretty standard, but it's a little bulkier than a standard piece they would use on missions. The comm channel seems to function normally when Athena tests it from her mobile host in Bridgette's tablet. Lena asks what it's for, but the man in question is whisked off by his manager before he an explain anything in much detail. A "Trust me!" Is all they get in response as his form recedes from view.    
  
-   
  
"Clear!" Lena chirps to the comm, turning back towards where the crowds are splitting in rivers to reach their seats. She's at the back of the second level of seats, edging around the flow of people being directed by the security guards for this sector. She's been through all three of the entrances on the southeast side of this level, but there's only so much checking that can be done until people finally settle into their seats. The final pre show check will happen when they close the doors, but for now they're watching for anyone trying to tamper with equipment or otherwise sneak in through unauthorized means.   
  
She tugs the security jacket over her harness, feeling cartoonish and ineffectual, even despite the giddiness of attending an Auditivia concert. The interviews were thankfully short due to everyone rushing to set up and get footage of the actual concert, so getting away from cameras was easier for her than she expects it'll be for Reinhardt, who can't exactly hide his height under a jacket and slip backstage.   
  
The doors click shut as the last streams of people file through, and Athena notifies them that her continued monitoring of security feeds has not picked up any thing noteworthy yet. Lena is outside the actual concert hall when the introduction starts, watching the stragglers for anything suspicious and directing people towards personnel with actual seating information when they ask for help. She can hear Lúcio's muffled voice ringing through the stadium even through the closed doors, and she slips through into the stadium proper to catch the latter half of his greeting.    
  
"Nothin' new here." She says into the security channel as she assumes a station near the back but still in view of the stage. They're not actual security, mostly just last case scenario backup, but she's still in mission-mode, scanning the tiers of seats and watching anyone moving around the back like a hawk. There are no exceptions when dealing with a Talon threat; she learned that the hard way with Mondata.    
  
That is, until the first notes of music flare up from the speakers, echoing over the shouts of the audience and sending a wave of anticipatory calm over the cavernous building. They ring like bells in her mind, and it's hard to ignore the bubbling excitement in her chest as the stage is flooded with fog.    
  
Just like that, the world lights up green as the man himself makes an entrance, coming up from a trapdoor in the center of the raised platform. She can hear the exhilaration in his voice as he asks the audience if they're ready, arms in the air and grin on his face. The answer is, of course, ecstatic screaming on the part of the audience as the music picks up pace. It takes her a minute from this far away to notice that anything is actually different about him, but the large screens mounted on nearly every wall make it clear: Lúcio is wearing _skates._ _   
_   
She knew his concerts were something to behold, but she never imagined a light show to quite this degree. The skates glow a bright yellow and leave streaks of light when he moves, and boy does he move. The music takes up a faster speed as he does a revolution on the circular stage, and she realizes with eyebrows pinched that his left hand is splayed open on what looks like a row of holographic audio sliders. She watches with wide eyes as he raises one slowly and the pace of the rhythm quickens in response, and as it seems like it couldn't go any faster, the stage is plunged into darkness again. All that can be heard for a precious few seconds are the echoing remembrances of the cut off beat, and the entire stadium seems to lie in wait, breath baited.    
  
The world lights up green as the melody hits again with full force, the audience's screams of glee only a background accompaniment to the electronic symphony. It's then that the spotlights lining the edge of the stage blaze to life, illuminating the ambient smoke and giving the impression of a flickering lime colored fire. The sight reminds her of something out of Reinhardt's stories; something about fire than can't be doused. The thought slips away from her as quickly as it came, distracted from the thought as the melody slows back down and the focus is forked over to the bassy rhythm. It's a reverberating sound that pulses through the foundation of the entire building, so much so that she can feel the vibration through the floor.    
  
Without the spotlight on him, the only thing of Lúcio that can be seen are the lights on his suit and the logo in the middle of his chest. It's all they need though, as his every movement is outlined in light as he races around a network of holographic dials and buttons, changing the volume and intensity with flicks of the wrist and swipes of the fingers. He reminds her of an ice skater as he spins back and forth between his soundboards, which look for all the world like a swarm of fireflies from this distance. She has to crane her neck to see him over a sea of glow sticks and waving hands, squinting at the summery blaze of color in the center of the hall. If she doesn't focus her vision she could be fooled into thinking she's just stepped into the middle of a galaxy.    
  
She has to leave for two more rounds of checks throughout the show, always returning to catch parts of the performance. They're almost at the finale when she catches the crackling snippet of a call cut short over the comms. Athena notes over the team channel that her view of the upper southwest sector has been cut off, and Tracer's already racing heartbeat manages to quicken. She slips back through the doors and away from the show, the thrum of the music following her as she jogs for the nearest stairwell. She takes them two at a time, remembering the way the King's Row Security detail had been cut off one by one. She still remembers the lifeless bodies littering the rooftops, crumpled like broken dolls on the pavement.    
  
No second chances. She knows the words they said, the words Amari herself said like a mantra, like a prayer.    
  
One shot. One kill.    
  
She won't let that shot happen at all. Not again. Even if it's nothing, she has to be absolutely sure. She notifies the team channel that she's investigating as she reached the floor Athena specified, taking a hard left and walking briskly down the dim hallway. A janitor to the right looks up, only mildly interested as she shucks off the security jacket and tosses it down next to an elevator, but she doesn't have time to make excuses if there's an actual threat. All the doors up here lead to skyboxes, most of which are taken up by corporation owners or celebrities, so she'll be in quite a spot of trouble if she opens the wrong one in her search. Luckily Athena's smooth monotone directs her to the blocked sector and informs her which boxes are occupied with actual show goers.    
  
The lights at the end of the sector are all off, and even despite the pounding music she feels compelled to stay quiet as she creeps forward. There are glowing directional signs lining the hallway, but they do next to nothing to cut through the blackness.    
  
The guard channel crackles uselessly again, and someone requests a check from the upper sector team that never comes. The words are on her tongue again, the same ones from nearly half a year ago now. _Mondata's in danger._ _   
_   
Mondata isn't here now, she tells herself. She failed him, but she won't fail Lúcio.    
_   
_ _"Foolish girl."_ The widow's voice had been smoother than silk and sure as sunrise. Her gun had clicked as she rested it against Tracer's temple.    
  
Her footsteps are in time with the thrum of music despite herself. She forces her breathing to be steady as she peeks in the first door. The people inside don't seem to notice as they're entranced by the performance, and she eases the door shut again so as not to bother them.    
  
One left.    
_   
One shot. One kill.    
  
_ Before she can open the door, Mei's voice cracks across the silence like thunder. "I've got a situation in section 215! The uh– assailant is armed!" She says to the security channel. Before Lena can say a thing, someone already responds to confirm that aid is being sent to that sector. She wants to rush there, but 215 almost directly opposite her position in the stadium, and if anything happens it'll be too late by the time she gets there.    
  
The last door still looms, unopened. Athena informs her that she is still unable to see into this area.    
  
One shot is all it takes. She can't wait for something to go wrong. It'll be too late.    
  
Tracer prepares to deploy her pistols, and pushes on the door.    
  
Nothing. It doesn't budge. Her heart feels like it's gone cold. She hears the clatter of Mondata's body hitting the ground all over again. She hears the fateful click of a rifle. Her gut says to do something– _anything._ _   
_   
Her gut hasn't been wrong yet, so her pistols disengage from the gauntlets and into her palms, her fingers already on the triggers. She takes three steps back and blinks into the door with full force, kicking them in with everything she has. The music blares as she crashes into the room, tumbling forward and into– into something she can't see through the inky blackness, harsh lines of green and yellow providing no insight as to what threat lies in the darkness.    
  
Before she can find her footing, the shot rings out louder than any music ever could.    
  
She sees nothing but bright, electric, furious blue.   
  
The rifle clatters to the floor and she's firing before she even knows it. There's the rattle of gunfire as the sniper tries to fight back, but they're on the floor in a matter of seconds, scrabbling for an advantage. Her heart is in her throat but she can't think beyond this fight or she'll end up dead herself.    
  
Too late does she notice the barrel of a pistol pressed against her hip. A second shot claps sharp and damning through the cold air, and she can't stifle the scream that rips itself from her chest.   
  
"Tracer!"    
  
_Go back,_ she pleads to herself, but there's nothing but the blood soaking her leggings, the searing fire racing up her right side.    
  
"Lena!"    
  
She struggles to breathe through the agony, a single thought bouncing mercilessly around in her skull. Go back, _go back–_ _   
_   
"Oxton!"     
  
She can't feel– can't think– there's just the bullet lodged inside her, the open flesh exposed to the unforgiving air. She tries to rewind– blink away– anything, but all it gets her is stumbling against a wall blindly, leaving red streaks on every surface she touches.    
  
The voices of her team are buzzing and faint from the comms, a hum of meaningless white noise that she can't pick apart to save her life. It might just come to that this time, and she still can't hear anything over her frantic pulse. Distantly she sees the sniper bolt through the doors, and she makes the mistake of taking a step forward to pursue them. She's rewarded for her mistake with a fresh wave of pain, and she has to stifle another scream.   
  
The comms buzz again, and she thinks she can hear someone asking for her status, but she can't tell who. She doesn't get the chance to say anything before the channel is dominated by a warbling melody, upbeat and quick to match her racing pulse. Through the red, she recognizes the tingling familiarity of artificial healing running down her spine. Unlike the surge of chill she's felt from the Caduceus System of Mercy's, this feels warm; encouraging. This feels like stepping into a beam of sunlight on a cold day, or like finally feeling the effects of the coffee you've been nursing all morning. Lena has no time to question it, because the fire in her side has sunken to a dull throb, and it's all she needs to race into the hall, guns ready.     
  
She's blinking forward the second she sees the figure dashing away, sending a spray of blasts into their leg and tackling them over once they start to lose balance. The sniper scrambles for purchase, but freezes when she presses her pistol against their temple.   
  
Every muscle in her says to pull the trigger. She never saw if the shot landed, she never had the time ask if everyone was okay. Lúcio could be dead. They might've killed him for all she knows– he could be dead, dead, _dead–_ _   
_   
But she doesn't. They're more useful if they can be questioned. She breathes a deep, shuddering breath, fractured and pained and terrified. She exhales as steadily as she can, and tells herself this is for the better. If they can get information it will ultimately serve them far better than the riddance of one agent.    
  
Ever so slightly, she eases on the trigger.    
  
The song subsides after a minute or two, and the time it takes feels like eternities. As the effect wears off, she knows instantly she's going to be seeing a lot of Angela for the next few weeks. Lena grits her teeth against the pain and the fear, never taking her eyes off the sniper.    
  
"Is everyone okay?" Lúcio's voice is the best thing she thinks she's ever heard, and her breath catches when she hears it crackling over the comms. She would cry out for joy if it weren't for the assailant pinned beneath her. He's alive. They're all alive.    
  
Instead of celebrating she presses the barrel of her blaster against the agent's head, punctuating her gritted, "Dont. Move." Her hand only slightly shakes as she moves it to tap on her mic. "I've subdued a shooter in 223." She tries to make her voice calm and _I'm not in gut wrenching pain at all, no siree_ as she can make it as she speaks over the guard channel. "Help would be greatly appreciated."    
  
"Copy."   
  
Mei and Reinhardt's panicked tones inform the team channel as well as the guard channel that they have an active shooter in one of the low northeast sections, but Lena can't be of much assistance as is, so she keeps quiet and presses the gun further into the agent's temple in warning.    
  
She still can't see terribly well in the darkness out here, but the glow of her accelerator is enough as she finally takes a moment to actually _look_ at the sniper. What she finds are piercingly blue eyes and a deep scowl, a long nose and a thick brow. A gaunt face, a furious face. A face that does not belong to the Widowmaker.    
  
Her emotions have become a cocktail of pain and confusion, and this only serves to spike it. She can't tell if she's relieved. She should be relieved. This is a good thing. And yet, there's something stopping her, something sitting in the pit of her stomach that keeps telling her that it's wrong somehow. She shakes it off– she's just gone through a great many things in very rapid succession; she's allowed to feel a bit of whiplash.    
  
Lena knows this isn't her, but she looks for the signs of a holonet anyway. Unsurprisingly she comes up short, and the feeling of twisted relief bubbles up again. She knew from the moment that shot went off, that if it were the Widow, it would have landed with microscopic precision.    
  
"Looks like the party's over." She exhales sardonically, the realization of her victory finally hitting her. She won this time. Even despite the throb of her right side, even despite the worry about the rest of the team, part of her revels in it.   
  
"Looks like it is." He says through gritted teeth. She wonders if it's the pain of his shot kneecap or the fury of having lost; she knows she's not heavy enough to do any damage to his ribs just from pinning him. The sniper breathes out and closes his eyes, almost as though he's steeling himself.    
  
The thud of approaching footsteps is pure relief. The security team pushes through the broken doors, and as they do Tracer looks back down at the sniper. "Try anything and you're toast." She reminds him, only a little smugly, but it doesn't seem to reach him. His face flushes a bright red and he looks like he might scream, but he holds in whatever he might have let loose with a will that would be admirable if he weren't Talon. She looks for something that could be wrong with him, but is stopped short as he wheezes out two words.    
  
"One... sh– shot..."    
  
She doesn't need to hear the rest to know what he was going to say after. Its a good thing, because he never says anything else through the foam spilling out of his mouth. It soon becomes apparent that no restraints will be needed as he convulses wildly, scratching at his neck and scrabbling on the floor helplessly.    
  
Tracer leaps off him and shouts a "Something's wrong!" But it's all too late. He's gone purple in the face, his fingers clawing at nothing. It's a matter of seconds before he falls still.    
  
She hears the Widowmaker finish the damning phrase in the back of her head, smooth and vicious over the chaos buzzing around her.    
  
_ One kill. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I didn't mislead anyone into thinking this was going to be a pure romance, because boy howdy I am way too into character development to dedicate myself to full cheese. The romance is coming, mind you, just not very quickly. That aside, I hope you guys enjoyed! I've been working hard on these, and I have so many plans for this series that I can't wait to write!
> 
> (*The Volskaya operation Widow references is from the Infiltration short, if that wasn't made clear enough. I figured a rehash of the short itself wasn't particularly necessary, or fun to read for that matter.)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
